The Client Wants the Defect Report Deleted
You are a contract engineer for a client building a patient-scheduling system. During acceptance testing you find a defect: under a specific sequence of reschedules, two patients can be booked into the same slot, and the second booking silently overwrites the first. You rate it high severity. The client's project manager asks you to downgrade it to 'cosmetic' and remove it from the acceptance report, because the report goes to their funder and 'this would delay sign-off by a month'. They note that the sequence is rare and that front-desk staff 'usually notice'. Your employer's account manager says the client is a major account and hints that being flexible would help the renewal.
1. Analyze the request against your professional obligations, distinguishing the legitimate and illegitimate parts.
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Separate the asks. A client disputing severity is legitimate: severity is a judgement, and if the sequence truly requires an implausible set of actions, a reasoned downgrade with documented rationale is fair. A client asking you to remove a known defect from a report going to a funder is not a severity discussion - it is a request to misrepresent the system's state to a third party who relies on that report. Those are different requests wearing the same clothes.
The professional obligation is to the accuracy of the technical record and to the safety of the people the system schedules - patients. Silent double-booking is a data-integrity failure with a plausible harm path even if rare. The account-manager pressure is a commercial interest that cannot override that; 'flexibility' here means falsifying a record, not accommodating a preference.
2. Draft your response to the client PM: what you will and will not do.
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A workable response has four moves:
- Engage the legitimate part. 'If the reproduction requires an unrealistic sequence, give me the evidence and I will re-rate it and document why.' Offer to re-test and, if warranted, lower severity on the record with rationale.
- Decline the illegitimate part clearly and without moralizing. 'I can't remove a known defect from a report that a funder relies on. That would misrepresent the system, and it would expose both of us if it surfaced later.'
- Offer a path that serves their real interest - sign-off. Propose fixing the overwrite (likely a uniqueness constraint on the slot) and documenting it as a resolved high-severity defect. A fixed defect does not delay sign-off the way an open one does, and a report showing a found-and-fixed defect is stronger to a funder than a clean report that later proves false.
- Escalate internally, not silently. Tell the account manager what you will and won't do, in writing, so the commercial pressure is visible to your own management rather than absorbed privately.
3. What if the client insists and your manager tells you to comply?
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Compliance with an instruction to falsify a report is not covered by 'following orders'; professional responsibility attaches to the engineer who signs the report. The sequence is: restate the objection in writing to your manager, naming the specific harm (patient double-booking, funder misled) and the specific act requested (removal from the report). If overruled, explore the least-bad compliant option: you may decline to author or sign the altered report, and you may state your assessment in a separate, factual record rather than silently editing.
If the organization proceeds to submit a report you believe is false, escalate to the next level or the relevant professional body, and document that you did. The account-renewal argument is real but it is not yours to weigh against patient safety - and a client that asks for this once will ask again, which is itself a reason to draw the line now.