Yes, the job of HR is to protect the company, but mostly that’s protecting the company from the company breaking labor laws.

No, it’s protecting the company from the consequences of breaking labor laws like the WARN Act, which may well apply in this employee’s case.

Companies love to break the law. Wage theft is bigger than any other form of theft in the US. What companies don’t like is to be exposed breaking labor laws, or suffer wage audits, or having to answer to pesky individual suits from disgruntled workers they assume couldn’t fight back but miraculously did.

Every single HR rep I have ever known – and that includes the ones I knew as friends outside work – made a knowing and openly acknowledged choice to check their conscience at the door to accept and keep those HR jobs.

You can justify it however you like, but it’s a choice, each and every time you lie, and it is for HR reps too. It’s just a more direct path to the paycheck and yearly bonuses for them: they literally get paid to lie, to hide, to fraudulently conceal illegal acts, and especially patterns of illegal acts, taking place within the company they represent, and to destroy and deny the existence of evidence whenever the rare employee who can fight back raises their head above the parapet.

And as a person who spent years in IT, I can’t even begin to tell you the actual illegal (and completely heartless and amoral) shit I have personally laid eyes on, like when I temporarily had to work at someone else’s desk on a network issue: a low-level but long-term housekeeping employee who was injured on the job had asked to return to light duty for a few weeks in a letter with medical documentation attached, and I had to sit there with it all spread out on the desk in front of me with a sticky note attached to it saying “Let’s draw a line under this, find a reason to fire her” staring me in the face.

If someone literally wants to lie for a living and be the dog that eats the other dog today, that’s on them. But stop trying to act like that’s NOT exactly how it is.