You manage the Macedonian side of an IPA cross-border programme with a partner organisation from a neighbouring country. The quarterly financial report is due to the contracting authority in five days, and the programme cannot draw the next tranche until the report is accepted.
Among the expenditures you must certify is a 9,000 EUR invoice from a local consultancy for "stakeholder mapping and facilitation". You cannot find the deliverable. The consultancy's director says the work was "delivered verbally, in meetings", and offers to write a two-page summary by tomorrow.
A board member of the partner organisation, who introduced the consultancy, calls to say that any delay to the report would "hurt everyone".
What should you do?
Pick the option that looks best to you, then reveal the answer.
Reveal the answer
Best answer
DDecline to certify the invoice, record what you found and the pressure you received, and raise it with the sponsor and through the programme's channel for suspected irregularities.
You certify what you can verify, you write down what you saw and who said what, and you hand the judgement to the people mandated to make it. That costs the programme a difficult week and leaves you able to answer for everything you signed.
The honesty and responsibility standards in the PMI Code have no deadline exception. The exam's trap is that three of the four options "protect the programme": one by submitting on time, one by producing paper, one by quietly parking the problem - and each of them makes you the person who signed for, or hid, a doubtful cost. In an IPA programme that is an irregularity, and the person who reported it is protected while the person who certified it is not. Note what the right answer does not do: it does not accuse anyone. It records facts - no deliverable found, an offer to write one retroactively, a call from a board member - and puts them in front of the sponsor and the irregularity channel, where the decision about what they mean belongs. The tranche will be late. That is a cost the programme can survive.
Why the other options are tempting but wrong
A. Certifying is a statement that you verified the expenditure. You did not. The size of the programme does not change what your signature means, and an ineligible cost found in an audit three years from now is recovered from the programme with your name on the certificate.
B. A document written tomorrow to justify an invoice from last quarter is not evidence that the work was done; it is evidence that it was not documented. Accepting it makes you a participant in the manufacture of the record, which is a step past merely signing.
C. The most tempting option, because it buys time and looks prudent. But it conceals a doubt you have already formed, from the sponsor and from the contracting authority, and it leaves the pressure - and the person applying it - in place for next quarter, when the same call will come.
Where this sits in PMI
PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct - Responsibility 2.3.1 (we uphold the policies, rules, regulations and laws that govern our work), 2.3.3 (we bring violations to the attention of the appropriate body for resolution), Honesty 5.3.1 (we do not engage in or condone behaviour that is designed to deceive others). PMBOK Guide 7th ed., principle "Stewardship".
Exam Content Outline tasks (PMP ECO) · 2026
- Business Environment 2 - Plan and manage project compliance
- Process 6 - Plan and manage finance
- Process 9 - Evaluate project status