My friend works for a large consulting company (you've heard of them). They were hired by a client who needed to reduce their labor costs by 10-15% (read: fire people) because they were hemorrhaging money. The team of consultants asked to NOT be given any performance data - and recommended that the consulting team handle the layoffs and fire randomly - this immunized the client from any discrimination lawsuits and was, according to the senior consultant, the most cost effective way to handle a layoff, once the cost of litigation was factored. The client signed off on the plan and the consultants executed it. The client was a big (>10k employees) tech company.

This is the world we live in, unfortunately.