She asked me to meet her at a coffee shop two blocks from the office, then put a folder on the table between us. She said the extra paragraph had been added personally by the company’s general counsel at the request of one executive. It wasn’t part of the standard severance agreement, and none of the other three employees had seen it. I asked why that executive cared so much about what I signed, and she told me the paragraph contained a waiver related to a specific internal investigation. Then she slid a copy of the original draft toward me. My name was the only one attached to it.
I asked what the investigation was about, and she said she couldn’t tell me everything without putting herself at risk. But she could tell me that my name appeared in several internal emails concerning financial approvals from the previous year. I had approved those transactions because my supervisor had instructed me to, and I had emails documenting every instruction. The extra paragraph would have prevented me from discussing those approvals or cooperating with anyone who later investigated them. I realized immediately why the company wanted my signature before I left. They weren’t trying to protect the company from me—they were trying to protect one person inside the company.
I refused to sign the agreement and took every document to my attorney. She sent a preservation letter demanding that the company retain all emails and records related to the investigation. Three days later, the executive who had requested the paragraph resigned unexpectedly. A month after that, federal investigators contacted me and asked whether I was willing to provide the emails showing who authorized the transactions. I gave them everything I had. The other three employees eventually learned about the investigation too, and none of them had been given the extra paragraph. They had prepared a special severance agreement for me because they knew I was the one person who had the emails that could prove what they had done.
