The Treasury says the company was lax in checking where its software ended up but that it did end up catching and fixing the issue.Microsoft has agreed to pay over $3 million in fines for selling software to sanctioned entities and individuals in Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Russia from 2012 to 2019.
The Treasury also says that Microsoft had some other gaps in its compliance procedures. There were apparently instances when it had information that should have alerted it to the fact that a sanctioned party was using its products, but it didn’t catch it for a variety of reasons.
The fines may seem like a small drop in the bucket for Microsoft, especially when the Treasury says the company netted around $12 million from the sales. However, despite the Treasury saying that Microsoft “demonstrated a reckless disregard for U.S. sanctions,” it seems to be cutting the company a fair amount of slack because of how it handled the situation.
That last part is probably the biggest deal. All of this happened before Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine , but since early 2022, the number of
The reason this is laughable: cant buy - will pirate. That said, MS should(!) indeed try to avoid making it easy for sanctioned entities to use MS tools.
So, Microsoft did some auditing and reported their findings and also fired some bad apples and called those resellers to order. It was the companies that resell their products and some Microsoft employees that broke the law
First time a Russian bought software?