I can COMPLETELY believe it was a lazy analyst at an insurance company. Boss: where's the data that Bob wanted? er... Here! (Source: been inside many insurance companies.)
Hanlon's (and Ocham's) Razor all the way here. Laziness / stupidity wins.
Hanlon's (and Ocham's) Razor all the way here. Laziness / stupidity wins.
I have fabricated data to shut up my political chain more than once in my life. Why? Because they kept pestering me after being told that the data doesn't exist yet but will exist naturally at some point in the future.
So, I can fight with my management chain because some VP has "collect data about X" on his quarterly goals and simply won't take "No" for an answer. Or I can feed him crap data that he will most likely forget about. And if the data is actually important, the data will fix itself in <n> months when I collect it.
Most probably, the data never gets looked at and I never waste the time collecting it. All good. I'm a wonderful team player that gets his job done. Probability: 95%
Or, possibly, some intern comes to me in 18 months asking why my data seems to be ... off. Cool. Unbelievably, someone is really using that data. I give a "Hrm. I'll go look at that." prioritize the poor intern, collect the data and give them an attaboy for being so diligent. Intern is happy and his boss thinks he's extra diligent. Probability: 4%
Or, if the data was actually important, I collected it and resubmitted it myself at the first point we could realistically collect it because I wanted it for myself, too. Probability: 1%
However, if that fabricated data somehow escaped the company and people depended upon it, yeah, egg yolk on the face all around, and I might get fired. Probability: 0% to a three digit engineering approximation.
It wasn't just my group being harassed. It was probably 15+ design groups. Sure, that VP eventually got nuked, but fighting with a shitty VP generally results in you losing your job before he does.
Politics is a thing. You pick your battles--you only get so many bullets. Too many people here on HN think that fighting every single slight makes you honorable. No, it actually makes you jerk--shitty things happen even at the best places and you need to deal with them without pissing everybody off--it's called being an adult. Sure, at some point enough shitty things happen that you should leave. Prior to that you need to learn how to deal with things so that your team is protected.
Feeding that VP fabricated data meant that he thought I was "good guy" team player. My chain VP got less political heat. My team got an extra positive evaluation for generating data early and going "above and beyond". Everybody on our side got back to doing their job instead of something stupid that would never help us.
All this at the possible cost that I might have to personally say "Whoops, I screwed that up. My bad." 18 months down the road for a single VP who may not even be there that long. I'm gonna take that tradeoff 99 times out of 100.
Now, is that the case here? Don't know and it doesn't look like it. However, don't rule out the fact that someone got "tasked" with something that was obstructing them and did the absolute minimum thing to make it go away.