Rant: My vendor contract chat with legal made me question everything

I sat down with our corporate counsel last Tuesday over a routine vendor renewal, and she casually mentioned that my department's headcount numbers were padded by 15% to hit a quarterly target. She laughed it off, but then she walked me through how the same inflated metrics got baked into our bonus calculations for the last two years. That hit different because I realized every "record quarter" email I cheered for was built on numbers that were never real. It made me recheck every internal report I've ever signed off on, and honestly, I found two other places where the data was massaged. Has anyone else ever had a conversation that made you audit your own work, and what did you do when you found the gap? I'm still deciding whether to flag it up the chain or just keep my head down.

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max_brown11d ago

Rewrite that expense report from last month and suddenly my "business lunch" looks a lot more like "lunch with a friend who knows stuff about business." I found a similar gap in my own numbers once, turned out I'd been rounding my hours up by half an hour every day for a year. Told my manager, he laughed and said "that's called estimating." Honestly, I kept my head down then and I'd probably do it again, but it does make you wonder what else is a little stretchy.

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mianelson11d ago

I read somewhere that auditors call that difference "aggressive interpretation," which sounds a lot nicer than it is.

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