Most companies purchase every licence in good faith. But environments drift.
Employees join and leave. Machines get replaced. A trial becomes an install. A licence stays assigned to someone who left in 2022. Software gets installed without IT knowing. Old versions remain on systems long after anyone needed them.
None of this is carelessness. It is every environment, everywhere.
The problem is that software publishers do not audit what you think is installed. They audit what is actually there. Old versions. Forgotten trials. The design tool someone needed for one project years ago.
The gap between those two answers has a price. And most organisations only find out the price when someone else does the counting.
The companies that handle publisher reviews well are not the ones with perfect environments. Nobody has one. They are the ones who checked before they were asked.
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