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

A reader writes:

There is a small team of developers working under me. We were working on creating a new product for our start-up. The lead full stack engineer building the web interface had been working on it for two months and was regularly giving us fake status updates. During this time, we also sponsored him to come to our country from Peru. Now after staying here for two months, he came just yesterday and said that he is leaving for a better company, and he says that he has not completed anything on that web portal in the last two months.

I realized I dropped the ball by not checking the demo and I shouldn’t have trusted him. But we are working in a very small start-up so there is a huge load divided between us. I’m 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 – today in Inc. In, where I’m revisiting letters that are buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding their responses). You You can read it here.

Other questions I’ll be answering there today include:

• Should I warn a salesperson about our difficult IT director?
• My company uses “reply all” heavily