Not me but a former coworker:

This guy’s name is Al and I worked with him for a year on a project. He told me he had been a mechanical supervisor on a gas plant upgrade a few years prior and had some issues with his former employer. If you are a supervisor or project manager in the petroleum industry on projects there is some paperwork that you have to do on your own time after work that you don’t get paid for, usually next days permits etc. Usually 1–2 hrs a night Over time on a longer project that time adds up. Usually on the last day of shift the contractor and or customer will let you go home at noon with full days pay and everyone is happy. Well Al’s boss would have none of that for time constraints but promised at the completion of the project he would receive a bonus equivalent to those extra hrs.

So on the last day of the project Al goes into the field office to drop off the final QC binder with the cost control lady so she can hand it over to the customers auditors. He then asks this woman about his bonus and she says there is no mention of it in his file and he should contact his boss, which he does. His employer thanks him for his service and basically tells him to f**k off.

Al is pissed off but he has no recourse so he grabs his hard hat, coat and assorted stuff, hops in his truck and heads for home which is 5 hrs away. He’s about halfway home when he looks over his console to his passenger seat and he sees the QC binders under his coat and hard hat. When he grabbed his armful of stuff he completely by accident grabbed the binder.

These binders can be huge but once I lost my reading glasses for a day when they were actually on my head so I guess if you're deep in thought you could inadvertently grab something this big subconsciously

He pulled in to Red deer (AB) at a McDonald’s and placed the binders in a dumpster, bought a McFlurry and continued his journey.

So if you know anything about construction projects if you do not have a QC binder to hand over to your customer’s commissioners and auditors it means the project never happened, you were never there and you can not get paid.

The next day Al’s former employer frantically phoned him and asked him where the QC binder was and Al truthfully answered that he handed it in to the cost control lady which she corroborated but she could not find it now.

If Al’s former employer had honoured his bonus they would of payed him about 36k but instead they lost 11 million dollars.

I have to add a post script to this, most or all projects are divided into quarters . As you progress through the project the auditors and inspector will sign off on completed work ,if all is satisfactory and the client is satisfied partial funds are released to the contractor.

I actually contacted my friend AL just to satisfy some armchair inspectors and engineers and the contractor received approximately 28–29 million$ of the projects funds but couldn’t collect the last payout of approx 11 million.

Al did say that he was contacted by the police and did receive threatening letters from his former employer’s law firm but there was no actual evidence that he removed the QC files from the office.

Now A supervisor does have personal copies of most of the files that go into the QC binders but they are in their personal laptops and basically their property or can be erased very quickly if you get my drift.

This company has since been bought out and this event took place in 2011 so I think my friend is safe.