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Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the day even in large firms you only need to fool three or four eyes. Those eyes might get a lot of transactions to process and a certain sense of complacency might occur. The hope is that automatic controls will aid those humans with all kinds of checks, but even billion dollar transactions at the end of the day are human transactions.

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I have been witness of spreadsheets passed through email, whatsapp, etc from one sector to another to initiate payments. It's all about trust perception. That is one of the weak links.

I don't get it. I work for a biggish company. Every time a user wants to join my Miro team I have to use a maze of ancient purchase order systems like Sage with multiple levels of approvals from our finance team. It's almost outrageously draconian but... not a penny goes by unpinched.

This is astounding levels of incompetence.

I’ll give you good odds that if you ever talk to the CFO about the transactions they personally sign off on, it’s a lot of emails and spreadsheets passed around. Processes are there for the little people, the big ones are chefsache. I also know what the biggest risk are. Not the automated stuff, not the very big M&A stuff, it’s the not yet automated routine combined payment order that is boring but rests on a few insiders to keep working. Insiders are very much in demand for these cons. The voice of the CEO is nothing, you need the proper tone, the proper pomp and circumstance.

The reality is these processes, while on paper "applicable to all users", can be bypassed the higher up you go. Culture issue.

That's not a culture issue. The alternative is that no one in the company has the power to do anything.

If processes can't be bypassed, then as soon as you implement a detrimental process, your company dies.

In other words, detrimental processes are only for the worker bees.

You don't want them anywhere. The fact that people exist who can bypass detrimental processes that apply to low-level workers is what nvr219 was complaining about.

You are a low level grunt. Directors and executives are not using sage for a lot of things.

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