Hewlett Packard sued for shortchanging its employees

As a result of serious glitches of a sales force commission tracking system known as Omega used by Hewlett-Packard three former employees of HP filed a lawsuit against the company.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal broke the story about the Omega commission calculation system not paying employees correctly.

The exact nature of the glitch in the Omega commission system has not been disclosed, but HP has confirmed that about 2,000 of its 23,000-person salespeople have been affected by the issue, employees in the "business technology group" have not been paid their proper monthly sales commissions this year.

The Omega application apparently started choking last November and can't keep up with HP's sales volume, and after numerous fixes, it's still not working right.

Former HP employees Jeffrey Johnson, Jennifer Riese, and Shaun Simmons teamed and filed suit against HP in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, claiming that as many as 50,000 employees might have been shortchanged on bonuses and commissions because of errors in the Omega system.

In turn, HP released a statement saying that the lawsuit "exaggerates the scope of the previously acknowledged issue" and that it indents to defend itself in court.