TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Days after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) internal announcement that it was terminating seven employees for "violating the company's core values," a media report unveiled the reason behind the mysterious multiple layoffs.
The unusual move came against the backdrop of TSMC stepping up talent recruitment to address global chip shortages as well as its expanding capacity to meet the evolving needs of clients.
"Firing seven people at once is as odd a move as we've seen so far because in the past, the company had fired no more than two employees at once for violation of trade secrets,” a person familiar with the matter told Mirror Media.
The announcement, which was made before the Moon Festival holiday, explained that seven employees were terminated due to severe violations of the company’s internal rules and core values.
"Integrity and honesty are our top ethical principles with which our employees should abide," another company press release stated after the news was made public.
On Monday (Sept. 27), Mirror Media reported that the seven people were fired after being found to have profited from insider trading.
Working at different divisions of the company, the group was led by a manager of an equipment engineering department who teamed up in June to exchange business intelligence with others. In addition to using internal communication software, the group took it to an extreme by setting up a subscription-based investment club to leverage intelligence for speculative stock trading.
Through the videoconferencing software Microsoft Teams, they informed one another of critical updates, such as which clients placed large orders.
The operation began in June when TSMC shifted to a work-from-home model in response to a surge in local COVID-19 cases, the report said.
However, over the following three months, the now-former employees went through a rough patch as the domestic stock market was hit by volatility.
Some of the alleged insider traders took losses. When they failed to receive compensation from the club operators, they reported the operation to TSMC's compliance department.
After the tip, the company immediately started investigating and reportedly found evidence of wrongdoing.
Among the seven employees, past conversations were discovered to have been recorded on the company's virtual private network (VPN) monitoring tool for remote workers. The tool is said to be popular among tech giants in Taiwan.
A human resource specialist at a domestic semiconductor company told media that the seven people might not have been aware that the VPN network they accessed through laptops or other devices was still tracking their conversations outside the TSMC buildings, where internet access is restricted.
