I work for a small engineering company. For the past 5 months, our pay has been late by 1-2 weeks.

Apparently the owner hasn’t been paying sales tax and owes about 400k to the IRS. Additionally they have about 300k in debt to banks, loans, credit cards, etc.

They are currently just able to scrape by. There just seems to be an utter lack or urgency on behalf of the owner. Whenever I bring up issues, the owner completely dissociates and does not care. I’m just shocked at how little everyone seems to care. We have a manager that has known addictions issues and has been consistently late by months on work, & there are no repercussions. No coworkers seem alarmed. No one seems to care. Things continue as if everything is okay. It is unfortunately a toxic and fear-based culture where people like to one-up each other so maybe that has something to do with it? There’s no murmurs or gossip.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. How much longer can this go on for? How havent tax agencies absolutely destroyed us? What compels a business owner to just keep running the train into the ground? Is this a common thing with a small failing company? I just don’t understand & each day feels like a disaster. It has been very exhausting.