memes

I did an internship at a bank way back, and my role involved a lot of processing of spreadsheets from different departments. I automated a heckton of that with Visual Basic, which my boss was okay with, but I was dismayed to learn that I wasn't saving anyone's time except my own, because after the internship was finished, all of the automation stuff would have to be deleted. The reason was because of a rule (I think a company policy rather than a law) that required that any code has to be the custody of someone, for accountability purposes — "accountability" in this case meaning "if we take unmaintained code for granted, then we may find an entire department's workflow crippled at some point in the future, with no-one knowing how it's meant to work".

It's quite a different thing than what you're talking about, but in terms of the implementation, it doesn't seem too far off.