Even if it wasn’t so much “manipulative”.
When I was at a small company that worked with radioactive material, we had to register and secure all radiation sources, even the extremely weak ones that anyone can order online with no restrictions. Before the state inspector came, we deliberately left one of those weak sources out where it wasn’t supposed to be so that the inspector would find something wrong, tell us to fix it, and leave feeling like she did her job. It would be the smallest possible violation and it wouldn’t actually get us in trouble. We did that because we figured that if there was nothing obviously wrong, the inspector would look for problems a lot more carefully.
(Nuclear physicists are rather more nonchalant about radiation than the average person is, for obvious reasons. By nuclear physicist standards, we didn’t actually have any dangerous sources at all. Thus we felt like we weren’t doing anything morally wrong, but I suppose that the average person might have disagreed.)
We had great health inspectors at my former food service management job. There was no way to conceal that we had mice. But the mice never touched the food. My district manager had made a room towards the back into a chill meeting room with couches from Habitat for Humanity. Those couches turned into their nests.
I went so far above and beyond to fix the mouse issue. I tore out a drop ceiling in one of our dry storage areas with no training and no protection. I was getting below minimum wage at the time because I was on the lowest possible exempt salary. I got showered in mouse shit and who knows what I breathed. I did this because the inspectors were cool and wanted to help us with the problem instead of shut us down.
They forced us to use glue traps through which I disagree with morally versus kill traps. I used oil to set many mice free. Most of them probably went back into the store.
meanwhile the last NRC audit at my workplace, the inspectors didn’t even use the hand and foot exit monitors on their way out. 🤦♀️
I actually worried for a bit that it was a test and they were looking for someone to stop them, but nothing was on the report. smh
Ages ago, I was part of a department that was subject to a compliance inspection. The inspection wasn’t a surprise, but it was short notice. We spent days making sure that our two networks of hundreds of computers each were compliant (they mostly were) and that our documentation was up to date (it mostly was). They spent their entire inspection looking at two internal DNS servers. (They passed and we were praised for our higher than average compliance.)