23-year UKG veteran sues, says pretextual PIP forced his exit

The tone shifted, Thakkar alleges, after a series of reporting-line changes brought him under significantly younger, less-experienced managers. He says he was quietly cut out of planning meetings, stripped of high-visibility work and funneled into documentation-oriented tasks. The same technical depth that had once been praised, he alleges, was suddenly reframed as being “too technical” and “not aligned with modern management.”

Then came the rating. In December 2023, Thakkar says, he was asked to step down as manager or be placed on an undefined performance improvement plan. He stepped down, and got a “2” — what the filing describes as the first such rating of his twenty-year career. That number, he alleges, automatically wiped out his bonus and pay raise under a rule that he says other divisions did not apply the same way.

A formal PIP followed on or about June 25, 2025. According to the filing, it required fifteen to twenty hours a week of added documentation, leaned on anonymous satisfaction metrics, and barred him from discussing it with colleagues. When he pushed back, Thakkar alleges, an HR representative told him the plan “was not subject to negotiation.”

On June 30, 2025, he lodged an internal complaint alleging age discrimination and retaliation. Two days later, on July 2, 2025, he resigned. In the meantime, he says, HR did not investigate, reaffirmed the PIP, and presented a severance of roughly eight to twelve weeks — well short, he alleges, of UKG’s earlier Voluntary Retirement Program, which offered ten weeks of pay plus a week per year of service up to twenty-six weeks, a cap his tenure would have hit.

For HR executives, the filing reads like a study in contested practices: shifting subjective standards, a PIP issued weeks before exit, severance pitched as the off-ramp, and a discrimination complaint followed within days by resignation.