IBM delays $510,000 suit for recovery two dozen times

KARACHI: International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has successfully delayed a suit for recovery worth $510,000 24 consecutive times to date, most recently pushing a hearing slated for January 14, to the January 21 on grounds of the legal team being unavailable.

The case pertains to a former IBM territory manager named Wasim Iqbal who claims to have been denied a total of Rs 81.5 million as a result of closing business deals for IBM. In Pakistan, 55 per cent of IBM employee salaries are fixed while 45pc is variable and dictated by incentive plans offered to employees on a semi-annual basis.

Iqbal was tasked to generate $5.71 million in primary signings and $76,000 in secondary signings. According to documents seen by a local news outlet, Iqbal managed to bring in $13,770,017 and $7,333,617, thereby exceeding the primary and secondary signings by 240pc and 9,649pc, respectively.

However, Iqbal was denied his commissions, with the company claiming that assigned targets were miscalculated. Instead, the employee received a little over Rs9 million out of the total Rs90.5 million he was promised. Consequently, Iqbal filed a case against the multinational technology and consulting company in January 2019.

According to public domain court documents made available to Profit, IBM failed to reply to the allegations, seeking time on various pretexts, thus losing its right to reply in September 2020.

Furthermore, offered 90 days to challenge any order, IBM chose to challenge the removal of the right to reply on the 89th day, while pleading to the Lahore High Court (LHC) to stop the civil court proceedings, which the LHC denied. To date, IBM has never formally replied to the suit for recovery which was filed over two years ago to date.

“We do not discuss human resource matters publicly,” said Jumana Akkawi, external relations manager at IBM Middle East & Africa, in a statement to Profit after we requested a comment from Ajay Dua, general counsel at IBM Middle East & Africa. 

As reported by ProPakistani, this isn’t the first time a former employee has filed a suit for recovery against the American multinational technology and consulting company which claims to support and empower its over 400,000 employees. 

A lawsuit filed against IBM in California revealed that from 2013 to 2015, IBM secretly underpaid its sales representatives in the US by more than $40 million. In November 2019, IBM lost a suit for recovery against a former employee who alleged that the American multinational technology and consulting company underpaid him $249,675 in commissions for sales he made in 2016.

In a 2020 study by IBM and Morning Consult comprising over seven thousand people in 14 countries, 80pc of global respondents agreed with the statement that corporations have a responsibility to prioritise their employees, the environment, and their community as much as they prioritize delivering profits to their shareholders. 

In addition, 78pc of respondents said they would feel much or somewhat more favourable toward an environmentally responsible corporation, with IBM publishing a white paper on how companies might best design their programs for social good.