[lolc]

> He was fired.

No! It happened in the middle of a contract which wasn't terminated. There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.

> Paying people not in your employ is fraud, [...]

The person was still employed. If anything in this story was fraud, it was the company stopping payment based on a wrong termination date. They even knew the date was wrong and still didn't pay. Clear-cut case!

Of course, if the parties later agree that the contract was in fact canceled at that point, that's how it is. Because parties can agree to cancel a contract. What a sucker though in this case.

[krapp]

>There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.

It does seem like there are two ways of looking at it.

As I read the article, the employee's manager needed to renew his contract, which he failed to do. And this is a literal quote by OP from the article:

    "When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me."

The wrong termination date wasn't entered, the correct, existing termination date wasn't updated in time. Those are two different scenarios.