Internet payment processor iBill fired about 50 employees yesterday across a wide variety of departments, sources within the company confirmed for XBiz Wednesday.
Included in the layoffs was the woman who posted the Commerce Management Interface updates regarding the current state of delinquent payments caused by iBill’s recent financial woes.
Word of the firings began to spread around adult webmaster forums on Tuesday evening.
One user, who said he was one of the iBill employees that was let go, posted on GoFuckYourself.com that about 50 people had been let go from the company and that severance pay and retirement benefits for the former employees was in question.
“Please understand that there are only 45 employees left,” wrote the poster. “The customer service [department] is mainly temps.”
“Yes, we are concerned about the 401k money that was not paid since July,” the poster wrote. “And, yes, we are concerned if a paycheck is coming in the mail (“In the mail”… how many times was I scripted to say that?) along with untaken vacation pay.”
Calls made by XBiz to iBill officials were not returned and calls made to the sales department were routed to a terminated employee’s voicemail.
The firings come less than a week after a risk-assessment analyst posted on the XBiz boards regarding the poor management conditions that may have led to iBill’s current problems.
“It appears indeed that iBill was relying on future sales to pay previous obligations, such as webmaster payouts, while current webmaster revenue was used for operating costs,” posted Grant L. Hutchison, chief security officer for Militis Intelligence Corp, suggesting that iBill was effectively living “paycheck-to-paycheck” instead of holding funds in reserve.
“[This is] a practice any risk-assessment team would have found inappropriate at best, with reasonable grounds,” Hutchison said. “It led to iBill defaulting on webmaster payments as early as mid-September.
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