[amyjess]

I work for a defense contractor, and pretty much the only good thing about our (government-mandated) insanely bureaucratic timekeeping policies is that you will never see something like this happen at my employer.

Edit: Giving some details about defense contractor billing.

For those not aware of defense contractor timekeeping, every single paid hour has to be billed to exactly one thing, and each employee needs to explicitly bill the hours themselves on their timesheets.

If you're on vacation, you bill your hours to vacation. If you're working on a project, you bill your hours to the contract that funds the project. If you're sick, you bill the hours to sick leave. If you're working on a purely-internal project, you bill the hours to internal projects.

Billing hours to the wrong project is legally considered fraud, and it can get the company in serious hot water. Besides, no defense contractor would want to bill working hours to vacation: the company makes no money from hours billed to vacation, while the company makes money for each hour billed to a contract. Now, if they want to interrupt your vacation by making you bill hours to a contract, they can, but that eats into the amount of available hours they're allowed to bill for that contract (hours which would be much better being billed when you're in the office and are able to sit down at a work computer and do real work), and you get to keep your vacation hours, so you can prolong your vacation.