Winning the "Crap" Lottery in New Beginnings

Why is it that sometimes random luck aligns just perfectly to screw a person over? Allow me to elaborate. One of my responsibilities is capitalizing expenditures. My company builds a lot of it’s own machinery. They order the parts, assemble the machine, and put the machine in service once it’s complete. When the invoices arrive, the amounts are posted to the “capex” account, where I keep track of which invoices apply to which projects. Once all the invoices have been posted to capex, I capitalize them, that is, transfer the total amount of the invoices to the final asset account where I can start depreciating it.

At the moment, E&Y is auditing us. They took a list of the capex projects I had capitalized, and randomly selected a project. For the project they selected, they want to see the supporting invoices for all the amounts posted to that project. One of the projects I capitalized was one I inherited from the person doing this job before I joined. I capitalized in 2014, but the project was from 2011. The responsible party took his sweet, ever-loving time ordering and assembling all the parts, thus the delay. The project should have been capitalized well before 2014, and it wouldn’t have even been a possible selection for audit, but I capitalized a dozen projects last year, what are the chances they’d select that one? Apparently, it’s 100%.

“Big deal,” a person could say. Well, one of the amounts posted to this project wasn’t an invoice, it was some sort of correction. That person left our group, but we still have her old journal entries. I can just look through her folders, find the support for that entry, and send that with the invoices. Well, of all her journal entries we still have, guess which one isn’t there. That’s right, the only one I need. Not to mention, for some reason, accounts payable accrued a bunch of sales tax amounts to that project that aren’t even on the invoices, which seldom happens. Not only that, one of the amounts is for an invoice, but the system doesn’t have the invoice number. Any other project would have all invoice numbers for each amount, but not this one.

Basically, the E&Y auditors could have select any of the other projects, and I could have provided all they wanted with no problems, but they just happened to choose the one project that looks like it’s been managed by an idiot. Is luck a cumulative thing? I wonder if the people who have the good luck to win the lottery are using up the luck of everyone else, which is why nonsense like this happens.