This normalization of deviance can burn you for playing along.
In a previous job at an F100 company we routinely used contractors for a lot of day to day work. Every other week we had to sign a statement certifying the number of hours worked. This was fine for the first couple of years when we only had about a dozen contractors split across two managers.
As our organization grew, so did the number of contractors, mostly under a third manager at a different site. Due to peculiarities about how this large, blue logoed F100 company dealt with purchasing and contractors, I and a peer still had to sign the certifications instead of the third manager. We both protested (verbally, which was a mistake in hindsight) but were told "just go ahead it's how we do things."
Funny thing. That third manager, working out of our sight with their army of contractors at another site? Yeah. They were colluding with the contracting agency to overbill the company.
My peer left for unrelated reasons. The colluding manager left for another company as the scheme was coming to light. I spent a week being grilled by the company's purchasing team and eventually company lawyers about my "participation" in the scheme. Because, of course, I had signed all of these timesheets certifying that the hours worked were true.
In the end as far as I can tell the only penalty was for the contracting agency to be barred from working with the company again (they closed, formed a new LLC, and started right up again within a year). I got dinged professionally as the only manager left holding the bag so to speak.
So, if you find yourself in that sort of situation where you're being pressured to accommodate the process because that's how we've always done it, get it in writing absolving you of any responsibility for signing off.
I used to work for a consulting/contracting company, with 6-10 reports at any given time. I was responsible for reviewing and approving their time sheets.
Except that, due to the nature of the business, I didn't see or even communicate with most of my reports on a daily or even weekly basis. They were working on different projects under different contracts for different customers in different locations. My manager responsibilities were an add-on to my own near-full-time billable work.
I raised my personal concerns to my own manager(s) that I did not feel that I could confidently and truthfully review and approve my reports' timesheets. Their response was effectively "just go with it, it's the way it works". Basically I was told to rubber stamp them with my name as the approver.
I don't necessarily believe that anyone was maliciously abusing the system, but I definitely believe that casual and hard-to-prove overbilling was a regular occurrence.
In a previous job at an F100 company we routinely used contractors for a lot of day to day work. Every other week we had to sign a statement certifying the number of hours worked. This was fine for the first couple of years when we only had about a dozen contractors split across two managers.
As our organization grew, so did the number of contractors, mostly under a third manager at a different site. Due to peculiarities about how this large, blue logoed F100 company dealt with purchasing and contractors, I and a peer still had to sign the certifications instead of the third manager. We both protested (verbally, which was a mistake in hindsight) but were told "just go ahead it's how we do things."
Funny thing. That third manager, working out of our sight with their army of contractors at another site? Yeah. They were colluding with the contracting agency to overbill the company.
My peer left for unrelated reasons. The colluding manager left for another company as the scheme was coming to light. I spent a week being grilled by the company's purchasing team and eventually company lawyers about my "participation" in the scheme. Because, of course, I had signed all of these timesheets certifying that the hours worked were true.
In the end as far as I can tell the only penalty was for the contracting agency to be barred from working with the company again (they closed, formed a new LLC, and started right up again within a year). I got dinged professionally as the only manager left holding the bag so to speak.
So, if you find yourself in that sort of situation where you're being pressured to accommodate the process because that's how we've always done it, get it in writing absolving you of any responsibility for signing off.