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I believe your war story, because I've seen the likes of it in a previous job. Being as vague as possible, two separate entities were amalgamated into One Big Happy Family for the sake of efficiency and cost-cutting and other fun management notions. It was all going to be peachy, the matters handled by both halves would now all be handled in the post-amalgamation blob and this would mean Better Customer Service and More Responsiveness and the other buzz words.
First thing to blow up was the annual Christmas party (I hadn't worked there long enough to have gone to previous parties). Before, both places had their own parties and management of both places threw a few bob in the respective funds for it. Afterwards, entity A (based in the city) would not come down to our town, and entity B (based in our town) would not go to the city to host it, because transport (everyone wanted to get blotto on free-ish booze because it was the Christmas party, nobody wanted to have to be sober enough to drive home). Plans to arranging hire of private buses (so people would be collected and then dropped back home or near enough) foundered on "yeah, but where will we hold it?" There wasn't any compromise "here's a nice restaurant or hotel halfway between both places", so it ended up no Christmas party at all for anyone.
That was the kind of co-operation and mutual understanding which developed between the two halves, which post-amalgamation continued on with "we do our stuff, you do your stuff, we don't interact or co-operate any more than absolutely necessary".
I imagine the reason for the accounting snafu was a combination of acquiring company accounting department going "Well nobody told us we were supposed to pay their bills" so the bills coming in got shoved into a pile on somebody's desk and ignored, and "who the hell are these guys, never mind, go to the bottom of the heap while we deal with the really important payments for our main office".
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