The dedicated compliance person is not unusual and that fact alone should tell you everything about how broken this system is. We track co-op recovery rate internally and our best year we got to 71 cents on the dollar after three rounds of appeals on denied claims. The denial reasons are almost always documentation formatting rather than anything substantive. Wrong font size on a disclaimer. Vendor invoice date outside the submission window by two days. Logo usage that did not match the brand guide that was updated six weeks into the campaign without notice. The system is designed to create friction. I do not think that is an accident. The accrued funds that dealers never successfully claim go somewhere and it is not back to the dealer.

I want to offer the inside view on this because I have sat on both sides of the co-op table. The compliance requirements exist because in an earlier era dealers were submitting claims for advertising that had nothing to do with the brand or in some cases did not run at all. The documentation standards got built up as a response to real abuse. That does not excuse a system that has calcified into something that punishes legitimate spend, and I agree the current model has way too much friction for dealers acting in good faith. But the answer is not no standards, it is smarter standards. Pre-approved vendor lists, automatic invoice matching, digital submission with real time status are all technically solvable. The will to actually fix it at the OEM level is the missing piece.