'How do you go a year without these files?': Compliance officer gets laid off, contacted a year later asking for help recovering vital compliance files

If you were to be laid off from your job, only to be contacted a year later asking for vital information that it was your job to keep safe, that's pretty much your employer admitting how much they actually needed you in the first place. All we're saying is, make sure to take that into account when you set your new terms, and if they're bringing you back on a temporarily contracted basis, be sure to charge accordingly.

Of course, it's more likely that, if things ended badly enough, you'd prefer not to help them out at all and live on with the satisfaction that you had the last laugh.

This compliance officer was laid off by their workplace along with their entire department after being called into their boss's office at the end of their shift and being told that they didn't need to come in the following day. They transferred essential compliance documents into their boss's care before clearing their work computer and walking away. 

A year later, they were contacted by the company that had moved locations and changed their name in order to distance themselves from the layoffs. It turns out the important compliance documents that it had been the compliance officer's job to manage hadn't been properly managed after their departure from the company. The company seemed to no longer have the files and reached out to the compliance officer, hoping they might still have copies. They—of course—did not.

See their account of events below and the reactions that it prompted when shared with a popular online community.