Regulatory Reporting: The Quarterly Fire Drill Nobody Fixes
Every quarter, the same thing happens. A small group of people stop doing their actual jobs and spend three weeks assembling the regulatory return. Spreadsheets circulate. Numbers get reconciled by hand. Someone stays late. It ships, just about, and everyone exhales — until next quarter, when it happens again, identically. Nobody thinks this is a good process. It persists because fixing it is nobody's project, and because the fire drill is survivable each individual time. Why it stays broken It's survivable. That's the core reason. A process that fails catastrophically gets fixed. A process that's merely painful, quarterly, gets endured — because the pain arrives on a predictable schedule and is absorbed by a small number of people who've stopped complaining. The knowledge is tribal. Two or three people know how the return is actually assembled — which adjustments, which exceptions, which manual overrides. It's not documented, and they're the reaso...