My initial reflex reaction is to think the same: however, when I consider what the process would be, I can see a lot of large businesses just not seeing it bein

My initial reflex reaction is to think the same: however, when I consider what the process would be, I can see a lot of large businesses just not seeing it being worth it to track down and retrieve company hardware from an employee who left under negative circumstances. Most laptops, especially issued to lower rungs of employees, aren't new, and even when they were, weren't high-end machines to begin with: they're probably the bottom tier really, whatever Dell or HP were selling at clearance prices when IT had extra budget. So let's pick a number out of a hat and say a laptop was $500 new, and for the sake of argument, let's say it was brand new when issued to a problematic remote employee several states away. This employee eventually gets canned for bad performance and doesn't ever ship back the computer: now what? Well, you have to spool up your legal division and arrange for a certified mail letter to let the employee know of their obligation, and see that it's delivered so the employee can't claim later they were never told. Then, you'd probably have to arrange for some company representative to actually go there and attempt to recover it in person, for similar reasons. If that doesn't work (and IANAL so this is just theory) you'd end up either involving their local law enforcement and probably your own to recover stolen property, OR going to small claims court against the employee. You'd have to have paper work in order showing when the laptop was purchased, what it's worth now to recover, and it's probably an open and shut case really to get it done, but then... you get a laptop back, or the cash value of it which is probably nowhere near what the company paid for it, and if it was sold off or junked or otherwise ruined and you DO get a cash settlement from court, well, now you have to COLLECT that which is it's own can of worms, especially if this employee is really pissed off with your organization. Every step along this involves your legal team, which consists at least partially of lawyers, who are expensive to have work on it. This will be labor intensive, not step by step but over the long haul: instead of a big job, it's tons and tons of little small annoying ones. AND: If the employee wants and I can't think of why they wouldn't, they could easily go to the media and vilify you for shit-canning them and then suing them. And sure, the facts of that would be obviously vindicating, but how many people read past headlines? Corporations fucking over working people is (rightly) hot news lately. So like, yeah that sounds high, I wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't that high. But also I wouldn't be shocked if faced with all the fuckabout to get a shitty laptop back from an ex-call center worker or whatever, most companies just don't give a fuck and write it off like they would any other lost asset.