July 16^th, 2003 (12:00am) - A former Microsoft Corp. employee, from the Microsoft’s Xbox division, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to falsely ordering software meant for internal use and selling it for personal profit, the third such incident since last December.

Kori Robin Brown, 31, a former administrative assistant at the company’s Xbox video console and games division, ordered more than $6 million worth of Microsoft’s SQL Server database software and sold it for personal gain between 1998 and 2000. Brown sold the software to a third party for between $50,000 and $100,000. Brown, who was terminated by Microsoft after an internal investigation prior to December 2003, is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 3. She faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000.

In Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, to be released later this week, the company has targeted 9 million shipments of its Xbox video game console by the end of June. Analysts, on average, expect in that report that the Redmond-based company announces a solution to slim down its cash reserves of more than $46 billion.