my employee lied for months about work he wasn’t really doing

A reader writes:

I have a small team of developers working under me. We were working on building a new product for our start-up. The main full stack engineer who was building the web interface had been working on it for two months and regularly giving us fake status updates. During this time, we even sponsored him to come to our country from Peru. Now after two months of living here, he just came up yesterday and says that he is leaving for a better company, and he says that he didn’t complete anything on that web portal in the last two months.

I realize that I dropped the ball by not checking out the demo and I shouldn’t have just believed him. But we are working in a very small start-up so there is a huge load divided among us. I am not sure what my options are now. I know I can’t stop him from joining that company. Can we take legal action here?

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

• Should I warn a vendor about our difficult IT director?
• My company overuses “reply all”

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