Anyone else been publicly blamed for someone else's work decision or mistake ?

[Eccythumpy]

A large company I used to work at ( left 5 years ago) Massive infrastructure update.
Company decision is made to put the change on hold until the next financial year. Im a bog standard Admin asst in the same location as the manager of the division the update is for. One of my duties is to validate payments against his cost centre. Literally they show up on the system, I email him for confirmation and either a code or invoice to match it to then send all through to finance. Literally takes 1 hour a month at most.
The update cost ( £0000,000's ) comes onto the system and Im told by the manager and the MD to "park" it, i e leave it showing as In Progress.
2 weeks later I am somewhat shocked to see my name on a busuness wide email blaming me for blocking this multi million pound update and calling for an investigation. 17000 people sent the email.
Head of Finance then calls me and is apoplectic. I just keep referring him to the manager. I was very upset but remained professional.

The manager in question was mortified and couldn't apologise enough, and the MD phoned me to aplogise, sent flowers, put out another email ect.
There is an investigation into how my name was brought into this and why .
It turns out that Finance had ballsed up on something else so someone there who was high up had decided to bring up what they considered to be my incompetence to make an example of why they arnt to blame ( like, yes we messed up,but look what SHE did) . Honestly it was fucking mental.
Anyone else been in the same position?

This happened half a decade ago?

what made you start a thread today about it?

Fair question. Because I was catching up with a friend who has just retired from the same company and she told me that the incident is used in training around confidentiality- with my name redacted.

If you were doing work whereby the MD of a huge 17000 employee company is telling you to do something or not to do something… you weren’t a “bog standard” admin assistant

I was.
Are you bored or something ?

Kinda but nowhere near as bad as yours. I wasn't 'publically named' or anything, but blamed for someone else's lack of communication and hung out to dry over it.

When I joined my department, a certain thing was done a certain way. I continued with it because it worked. Fast forward 4 years and my boss checks in on me and this process, I explain it and she says that's all good. 6 months later, she comes back and demands to know why I am doing it this way, we stopped doing it this way ages ago, that I think that I can just do what I want because I know best, etc etc. I politely explain why I do it like this, and she says I have an "attitude" (because I, a younger member of staff, disagreed with her).

Her boss then backed her up.

I asked why no one ever told me they didn't want me to do it like this anymore, and why 6 months ago I was told it was fine. I never got an answer.

This happened a year ago and honestly, I still cry about it sometimes. It was awful.

Aww, that's awful isnt it. I always asked for confirmation by email of any conversations because of situations like yours.

Very weird that an admin assistant in such a massive company is receiving direct instructions from the Managing Director!

I got a massive bollocking from a CPS lawyer in front of our barrister. I was assisting the main detective, the officer in case, while the case was at court. I had had involvement with the case initially, then it was taken off me, against my wishes when I moved departments and given to the other detective.
I hadn’t had any involvement for 12 months and she hadn’t done the case file properly, statements and evidence were missing. It was awful. I sat there and took it- CPS lawyer was on speaker phone in front of the barrister tearing a strip off me and I didn’t feel like I could put it right without pointing the finger really obviously.
My shit list went up by a total of two that day.

So the manager was told by the MD , I was included on the email as I was doing his validating. Pretty straightforward.

Yes. I was going on holiday so had a handover with my manager, and I reminded him he would need to do X while I was off. He forgot, and I got a bollocking for it when I returned.

I was blamed for something that wasn’t my job and so I didn’t get it done. It wasn’t delegated to me and as far as I was aware my colleague was doing it. When my boss realised no one was doing it I was asked to pick it up. I did the work and sent it out. I was then picked up for not sending it. When I showed him the email proving that I had sent it, he yelled at me for not cc ing him. On the work that I’d done to bail him out for not delegating or organising properly and had to do very last minute.
I don’t miss him, he was useless.

Yes. The problem was over a netted number of shares that obfuscated the actual problem. Another manager, for months, had insisted the problem was being investigated. I asked one of my team to unpick it whilst I was on leave. When she did, the full mess came to light and the cost was £££££’s.

Our MD went into full accusation mode. I was publicly blamed. I heard his exact words were “Vitriol will hang for this”.

I returned to utter, utter shunning. My role was taken away whilst a full investigation took place. It was awful. No one would speak to me at all.

When the investigation finally took place I produced my notes of what had been asserted by the other manager, evidence that I’d ordered the analysis and under duress eventually had to reveal that the MD and Manager concerned we’re having an affair. Everyone in the entire department knew. I had actually interrupted them in a meeting room on one occasion. Which led me to assert that I had been thrown under the bus by him to protect her.

This resulted in utter carnage. It was even more awful than the shunning. I kept my job and was transferred thank God, but the impact to me was immeasurable.

I saw one of them in John Lewis several years later, and said CUNT out loud as I walked by.

Even that line is a bit surprising

MD of 17000 strong huge company

Giving an instruction to the manager of a “bog standard admin assistant” regarding something to be done by an admin assistant.

I worked in admin and finance of a national Retailer, at HO, my office was in between the CEO and the MD. They'd often pop in to give us instructions or I'd go to them for their signatures to authorise things.
OP, it doesn't seem that unusual to me.

See, I'd have pointed that finger right back. Screw them all.

My old DS tried to throw me under the bus on the stand when giving evidence about disclosure. I had been the disclosure officer (one of five!) two years before court. He lied about decisions I had taken and hid emails I had sent to him and the senior management team raising my grave concerns about the strategic decision making in the case such as refusal to get early CPS advice this very complex fraud case in order to get direction set and the appalling handling of evidence by my predecessors.

I had left the Job and wasn't called, but was told by a colleague who was in court. I was beyond furious, and made it clear through various chains that I felt he had committed perjury. The case was lost anyway (mostly due to the appalling strategic decisions!) but I'm still angry a decade later.

17000 strong company?

and you are an admin assistant?

Wrong quote

You know the set up of every organisation on the planet, do you? That is some excellent work experience you have.

The person accused….. were they falsely convicted or freed as a result?

It was a huge complex fraud of millions of £, multi agency, multi year investigation.

Over twenty suspects. I managed disclosure of over 250,000 documents comprising of millions of pages in total.

No one was convicted of any offence.

Massive waste of time, money and energy in my opinion. If the managers had set the investigation up differently in the earliest stages we would likely have handed most of the investigation to the HMRC as it was based on carousel fraud which is not for police to deal with. Alternatively we could have taken a very different approach and simplified the entire case with what amounts to sample charges and had it over with in two years.

But no, the DS, DI and DCI all wanted promotion, the main DC wanted glory without doing the work and so it went balls out for over 5yrs and achieved nothing.

Yeah, the CPS and barristers seem to have no accountability. We, the police, get shit and have to deal with the tantrums and demands.
We are having to have a whole new trial because the judge misspoke when summing up. We are calling back vulnerable, young traumatised witnesses to go through the process again over a year later.
Some of the barristers don’t even turn up
to the pre-trail
hearing. They just send their junior.