A German car manufacturer's employees falsified information because the requirements imposed by regulators couldn't be met. Don't meet the requirements, company suffers, and the blame falls on those who didn't succeed it complying--not the board, not the CEO, but the engineers.
Mother worked in the "analytical lab" of a steel mill. It was a job a trained high-school drop out could have, hence she had it. A time or two the bit of the company that she was involved in was under extreme fire. In one case they lost a very large buyer because the coating on the sheet steel that they made had finally started being subject to quality control tests done buyer-side and kept failing. But they didn't fail the same tests done in the steel mill, and the steel company wasn't pleased to find out the buyer was attempting to replicate the test results. Outcome: Every test result had to be in duplicate, one attached to the coiil's paperwork and another attached to a snip of the coil that the test was for, which was packaged up and sent ... somewhere ... for spot checking and for insurance if there's any disagreement as to quality. Inference: Either the workers were incompetent (and the union had defended them) or they were falsifying results. Or the company brass were. That the brass wanted the snips means they wanted records and tin-plate to cover their collective ass. You lie on a test result, a spot check might find it; and since the samples were often really different between runs, grabbing a sample from a random coil might not just show a defect but an entirely different coating if the quality of the test is challenged.
Mother sweated for a while, then came home relieved. None of the batches bore her signature. In fact, she'd gotten in trouble for failing some batches. And prior to the investigation she said that she knew that other workers weren't telling the truth--why was it that she got all the bad runs? My mother and I had few things in common, but she insisted on doing her job properly and insisted on being as honest and truthful as she could be, and frequently got hell from her union for it--they needed somebody to help with the books, and she created a shitstorm when she found bribes and inconsistencies.
Anyway, my mother's sweating and the need for back-up samples tells me it wasn't the brass at fault in the steel mill. That tells me that it's possible for employees to deceive trusting or ignorant superiors. If in the largest freshwater steel mill in the US, why not in some podunk steel manufacturer?
If the director thought his ass was on the line, why wouldn't he have falsified it? Occam fits here: Why have more dishonest people involved than necessary? I assume given that testing is more complex now than in the late '60s and early '70s the director would have seen the test results, which would have been harder to falsify. Might be a bad assumption.
(The customer, btw, was Campbell's soup, and the result was that more than once soup produced and shipped by the company for weeks was in cans made from "tin plate" with defective coatings. No, "tin plate" didn't actually require actual tin in the local steel mill vernacular. We had no canned soup for a while. It was Campbell's or A&P's store brand, which was also Campbell's.)
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