I used to work in retail at Circuit City. Our inventory was a mess, so corporate hired a company to fix that. At 4 AM a bus rolled up with people that spent all morning scanning items. We had to monitor them for theft and such (yes we saw several attempts).

They did an awful job. For example they scanned an item and then saw there were 10 items behind it and just multiplied the first item by 10 on the scanner (think of thumbdrives where the first one is a 512 MB drive and towards the back there may be a 256 MB drive). Afterwards, our inventory was worse than before. Corporate of course couldn't know this. I know your story is different, but they could still be getting duped.