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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Independentvoter40 on 2025-06-06 16:55:23+00:00.
This happened last year. I work for a small startup company, a good company with good leadership. However, like any startup, we are full of ideas but low on process. As we grew our client base, we needed to give small credits (typically rounding errors less than $10). At this time, I was the Customer Service Manager. I had filled out feature change requests in our homegrown system to give our team the ability to process these credits within our system. Those had been ignored due to the mountain of other things our internal software team was behind on.
I was told that this wasn't a pressing concern and that, unless the client requested it, I should use a spreadsheet so they could do them all at once. I knew if done this way that it would take a good year for us to tackle this, furthermore, our clients would be upset. Somehow :), all the clients requested every single credit right away. Que in our team putting in a ticket for every single credit request the day of to get processed ASAP. We only had one billing software guy who could handle it (nice guy BTW). Due to his title and my knowing the industry, this guy makes 200k+ annually, so daily he would have to process $2-$5 credits manually. Remember that he and his team had nothing in the system to do this, so when I say manually, this involves him coding each one. It didn't take long for a process/button that we could click to credit on our side.
Some of the people I still hired work there (I've moved teams since I have been promoted a couple of times) and we were just joking about it earlier this week. Brings a smile to my face every time I think about. Not only due to "Malicious Compliance" but more importantly, I do like the company, and I figured this was the most effective way of forcing a spotlight on something that needed to change.