I have similar story about an employee being fired for a major noncoformance sited for shipping nonconforming product.
back in 2002 we were going through a QS9000 surveillance audit and the auditor found out-of-spec recordings on an in process inspection. The next day the QS9000 coordinator was let go. When the auditor returned to verify our corrective action, he stated that the former QS9000 coordinator asked him not to site a major nonconformance, because the company would fire him. The major nonconformance was not the reason the employee was let go. I new the employee was going to be let go, because my QM told me that I was taking over as the coordinator mostly because of the actions I took to get corrective actions completed from the previous surveillance audit, which I might add, I had 1 week to complete them becasue the previous coordinator had not started or assigned corrective actions immediatly after the surveillance audit. I might add that the previous coordinator was suspended due to the fact he aurthorized shipping nonconforming parts to a customer.
back in 2002 we were going through a QS9000 surveillance audit and the auditor found out-of-spec recordings on an in process inspection. The next day the QS9000 coordinator was let go. When the auditor returned to verify our corrective action, he stated that the former QS9000 coordinator asked him not to site a major nonconformance, because the company would fire him. The major nonconformance was not the reason the employee was let go. I new the employee was going to be let go, because my QM told me that I was taking over as the coordinator mostly because of the actions I took to get corrective actions completed from the previous surveillance audit, which I might add, I had 1 week to complete them becasue the previous coordinator had not started or assigned corrective actions immediatly after the surveillance audit. I might add that the previous coordinator was suspended due to the fact he aurthorized shipping nonconforming parts to a customer.
I was impressed of how good his statistical works that highlighted those undesirable events happening on their production lines… so, my overall findings is that they should come-out with an effective corrective actions to lessen (if not totally eliminate) these “undesirable” events…
… so, to make the story short, I asked one of their engineer how they did it… he simply answered to me “the management fired the industrial engineer…” 
