In selling passenger jets Boeing has to market to vigilant for-profit airline companies (private and foreign state-owned ones alike). Yet this is the level of wool it tried to pull over their eyes, and for a time, with the help of a compliant government department (the FAA), succeeded.
We can then only imagine the level of fraud that goes on behind doors when it’s selling, not to commercial entities, but to the US government, where it is accountable only to generals who are spending someone else’s money and have eyes set on cushy retirement bonuses that Boeing can provide. (The flying coffin that is the Bell Boeing V-22 certainly comes to mind.)
In fact I’ve heard it said that Boeing for the longest time kept its civilian and defense sections de facto separate lest the civilian part adopted the wastefulness and the shortcut-taking culture of the defense twin. However sometime in the late 1990s this separation started to break down resulting first in the runaway costs on the 787 Dreamliner project and now in the 737 MAX debacle.