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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/NotYourNanny on 2024-10-21 17:14:00+00:00.

Any competent accountant has at least a touch of OCD. It’s really necessary for them to do their job properly. But some have more of it than most.

At one time, we had a controller who really put the obsessive in obsessive-compulsive. And she decided that we were a little to fast and loose with the company credit card (which we were, at that point). So she created a “payment request” form and wrote a policy to go with it. The form wasn’t unreasonable (in fact, we still use it today). The policy was another story.

The form was to be used (per the policy) for all uses of the company credit card (which we used for everything, because the owner got airline mileage on it - it had a six figure limit, and it wasn’t unusual for use to have to make a mid-month payment to keep from going over - he got a *lot of miles). All uses, no matter how small.

The policy? Each form had to be signed by either the owner, or two higher ups, one of whom was frequently not in the office.

I’m the IT guy, and we’re a retail store chain (and a pretty successful one), so there are a lot of IT issues that are extremely time sensitive (gotta keep the cash registers running full speed), but can be fixed with very cheap parts.

And I was having to get signatures to order $25 parts off of the internet. Every time. With one of the signatures being from someone who was in the office less often than the owner.

So it was pretty obvious to me that the correct solution was to have the owner sign it all by himself. He always understood - all I had to do was tell him a cash register was down, and he got it. (I do like working for smart people.)

Until the day I took the third form into his office within an hour or so for his signature, because one of the other two people who could sign was out of town. He told me he’d “look into this” as he signed it, and as I walked by the controller’s office on the way back to mine, he was already there, having a (very polite, they were both professionals) conversation, and from that day forward, the executive VP (who’d been around from the beginning as was trusted as much as the owner’s own family) could sign my form all by himself (and I now have signature authority up to $500, as well as my own company credit card - with a much smaller limit).