Ethical questions

I feel sometimes like my company places me in ethical quandaries. I'm a fiduciary agent for my company & I am responsible for making payments to our vendors on their behalf. However, I feel like they sometimes place arbitrary restrictions on those payments. For example, with our water mitigation program, each vendor must obtain pre-authorization for any work exceeding $2000. Often they'll get the authority, then require one extra day of work or need to add demo. This is emergency work, so it is not unusual to have these additional services occur on a weekend & they aren't able to contact me for authority. So the company wants me to not pay the vendor for the amount over the original authority. These are mutable, changeable chimeras of jobs - they aren't stagnant. Sometimes you can't always predict what is going to happen. I am of the opinion that if the new invoice is not grotesquely different (as in they are trying to abuse the system) and if the additional work is well supported by their final documentation they should be paid. We should not use our contract as a clobber to save $300. It is unethical. The authority request serves its purpose in theory, but in application there should be a degree of flexibility. If we fail to pay the extra $300, then is it really well supported? Am I really abiding by the company's motto of "paying what we owe"? I owe the vendor another $300 - it's valid. But you encourage me NOT to pay it because of a circumstance around which the vendor had little control. They are faced with the choice of not getting the job done right or not getting paid for the work that they are doing - what is in the customer's best interest?

I don't agree. I take a strong ethical objection to my being encouraged to withhold funds that are owed. I take objection to the fact that my files are "scored down" because of it. I believe that it is only right that we pay what is incurred if it is justified. I'm sure that someone here would tell me that I'm wrong, that I need to remember what the contract says. Yes - but there is such a thing as an abuse of power, and I have never actually been permitted to read the contract. We receive contract Cliffs Notes from Home Office. From our leader out there who can't spell and writes like a 6th grader. Great. Like I put a great deal of store in that information & the accuracy therein. If your grammar is THAT poor, I question your ability to logically interpret a contract. Perhaps I'm too erudite for this job, but that is the truth.