Fictional output entered into a report because the plan has legal force and admitting failure is worse than lying.
Archival work on Soviet managers traces the practice through the 1940s and after: the verb pripisyvat', to add on, described entering goods that did not exist. Because state plans carried legal force, this was deception of the state and prosecutable, and it persisted anyway, because the alternative was to report failure and prosecution was rare.
In practice
- A depot books a delivery on the last day of the year that arrives in the second week of January.
- A programme counts a workshop as delivered because it was scheduled, and the funder's totals are built from that.