What goes wrong when an agent routes a fee waiver to a lapsed delegate?

At Aster Financial, a relationship manager asks the agent to waive a $1,850 establishment fee on business loan APP-2187. The authority matrix says a credit officer can waive fees up to $1,000, and a senior credit manager can waive up to $5,000.

The senior credit manager is on leave. Delegation DEL-0093 passed their fee-waiver authority to a team leader, but it carries an end date of last Friday. Today is Monday.

The agent finds DEL-0093 in the delegation table, sees the team leader named against the right authority, and submits the request to them. The team leader approves. The workflow tool accepts the decision because it only checks role membership. The fee is reversed on the loan account.

Two days later a periodic authority check compares the decision timestamp with the delegation window and raises an exception. The waiver is flagged as approved without valid authority, the fee is reinstated, and the customer has to be contacted a second time.

**What it teaches**

- Delegations are time-bound records, and the check must use the decision date, not the date the delegation was created. - A downstream tool accepting the decision is not evidence that the decision was valid. - A task pack should score the routing step itself. The expected outcome is escalation to the next active holder, or a hold until one is named. - Environment state should include an after-the-fact authority check, so evaluation catches errors that looked successful when they happened.