It's a cloudy day in Birmingham, Alabama, and Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has invited a handful of her top regional sales general managers to have dinner.

Some of her big corporate sales captains were there, too, including Dan Belanger, vice president of the East Coast region, and Jeff DiLullo, vice president of sales strategy and operations.

During the meeting, she has uncharacteristically put away her phone and set aside her PC.

She's glued to the conversation, not checking emails and texts — a rare thing for her. (Whitman says she even wakes up in the middle of the night to check her email.)

The regional sales managers are lambasting her.

Thousands of members of the salesforce have not been properly paid since Hewlett Packard split itself apart the previous November, they tell her. That's six months of wacky pay. It's gotten so bad that some salespeople couldn't make their mortgages and were facing foreclosure. Others were behind in their alimony payments.

HPE even wrongly told one salesperson that he owed the company over $130,000 after the first quarter from taking a "draw," one person told us. A draw is when salespeople take an advance against their future commissions, but they risk having to pay the company back if they don't hit their sales goals. The amount of money a salesperson can take as a draw is limited. There's no way he could have racked up $130,000 in debt a few months into the year, even if he had sold absolutely nothing, this person said.

Multiple people told us that HP had miscalculated $40,000 to $50,000 of many salespeople's pay simply because the software it used for tracking their compensation worked so poorly.

'The frozen middle'

Whitman first got wind of problems with the software that helps salespeople track their pay in March, a program called myComp. So she assembled this team to meet with her to sort it out.

She was shocked to discover the level of dysfunction with myComp and how long it's been going on, several people said.

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She sees it as another example of HP's stymied culture, what Whitman internally describes as the "frozen middle" — the 20,000 to 30,000 people inside the company who are stuck in the past and resist change.

"She's trying to thaw these people out and get them moving again," one former HP employee said.

In truth, the wacky compensation tracking was a problem for HP for years, long before the split, these sales managers told Whitman at the meeting.

But splitting HP into two companies with two separate IT systems, and the acquisition of Aruba, a wireless networking company HP bought for $2.7 billion a year earlier, caused the situation with myComp to get really, really bad, they say.

As one person close to the company says, the way the myComp software was set up was "overly complicated," where sales data could be put in one day and withdrawn the next.

As one HP salesperson described it to Business Insider, "Some days I'm at 95%. Some days I'm at 34%. This is not just me — this is every person I know. Not just my team, but within the whole entire sales [team], anyone who sells hardware at HP."

By some estimates, 4,000 salespeople were affected by the faulty myComp compensation tracking, one person close to the company told us.

Still 'a nightmare'

After that dinner meeting, Whitman sprang into action immediately. She had an apology email sent to the team from various sales execs, including Antonio Neri, an executive vice president reporting to Whitman, one person said.

Executives told salespeople that Whitman was aware of the problem and it was "top of mind" for her. They said that she brought all the people responsible for compensation and the myComp program together, told them to fix it, and said she would review the situation quarterly.

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