There is a certain culture that duplicates work in order to fudge the numbers to look busier than they normally would. It has nothing to do with honesty or ethics. Ethics never comes into play. The way its looked at is that it must be allowed and ok to do. If it wasn’t allowed then there would be a mechanism in place in order to keep them from doing it. So, work is duplicated, unnecessary tickets created, fluff work is exaggerated and so forth. Everyone knows this and they know the culture in question. Now, when I say “culture”, it could be Asian, American, European, Indian, Mexican etc….
We all know as to which culture, as this has come up before at work, many times now. Some verbal mandate is given as to “what and what not to do”. Down the road it happens again and its overlooked. Rinse, repeat.
Does it matter? Numbers are used to determine trends of problem areas in which money may need to be spent for improvement. This businesses success hinges on the accuracy of numbers. Numbers weigh in on layoff frequency and headcount to be let go as well as who gets what bonus, raises and if so, how much. So is this important? Does it really matter?
In this case, I know a few people from that culture and they wholeheartedly laugh their @ss off. Whenever all this happens, they hunt me down to show me the emails or chats about it along with smiley faces and ha ha’s. Its a game to them. Every time its brought up because someone is caught doing this, they round robin with “we did not know” , “we’ve always done this”, “I thought we were supposed to do it this way”. You’d think that Citi keeps track as to how many times the same offenders do this. Either they don’t or they do but really don’t care.