A skipped offboarding step cost one company six figures

A terminated employee kept working access to company systems for several days after their last day, and the resulting damage ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Yad Senapathy, founder and CEO of the Project Management Training Institute, recounting an incident from earlier in his IT career at a company with more than 1,000 employees.

The employee held elevated permissions across multiple systems. Before the lapse was caught, they deleted files, locked other staff out of accounts, and corrupted databases, pushing at least one active project back by weeks.

Senapathy traced the failure to a handoff nobody owned. "Nobody had been clearly assigned to shut them off. HR thought IT would handle it once the termination was processed. IT was waiting for HR to send a formal request," he said.

The fix costs nothing to implement: a same-day offboarding checklist that names one person accountable for revoking every credential, closing the gap where HR and IT each assumed the other side owned the step. Senapathy also recommends forcing regular reviews of shared administrative credentials and refusing to let any single account be the sole owner of a critical system, so a departure never leaves a system with no one who can safely take over access.

Access revocation is one of the most mechanical parts of running production infrastructure, and one of the easiest to skip when it isn't formally assigned to anyone. A checklist that names an owner and a deadline closes the gap this incident exposed.