In the military, a warehouse fire or equivalent suddenly generates a ton of "backdated transfer requests" showing that various stock had been sent to the warehouse just previously!
To be fair, there's a plausible explanation for what robaato describes that doesn't involve corruption. Suppose it's standard or common to move things first and then file such "backdated transfer requests". After a fire that destroys everything in a warehouse, there would be a flurry of activity to quickly account for everything that was destroyed, so paperwork that would otherwise have trickled in over a month or two might suddenly be hurriedly filed in a few days.