[legion]

My current employer? No.

One of my life lessons was a job I took in for a summer in college. It took me all summer to figure out that whoever took this job was going to fail at it and my failure was not my fault.

I took a job as a manager of a house painting crew one summer in college. I couldn't get ANY of the jobs done on time. Turns out that my salesguy (full-timer) had gone from the WORST salesperson in the company to the BEST salesperson in the company in the short span of three months (before I started). The amount of hours we had to finish a job was based on the dollar amount of a job. Guess what? He grossly underbid all of his jobs. When they did the calculation to figure out how much time I had to do the job, it also came up very short. Guess who got the blame for not completing the jobs on time?

As such, I have a keen sense for when people are trying to set me up for failure and refuse to put myself in such a situation. A practical example is when someone tries to establish "rules" for arguing on this BBS with me. I know that what they are really trying to do is to ensure they will win the argument by handicapping me.

As for your situation, if I was given a choice between spending more money and losing my job, I'd fudge the numbers. I have friends in sales positions and I've been a "prospect" for their expense reports more than once. Unethical? Yes. But so is rating people on money spent rather than the net revenue they produce.

As an aside, this is a constant argument I have with my management: if you rate people based on some metric, they will find a way to inflate that number. I see it all the time in my job. I've seen people who have 400 referrals that only spoke with 30 customers (making 400 referrals physically impossible). They figured out that they can "flip" the referral indicator on a screen multiple times to generate inflated numbers.