Not to beat a dead horse but help me understand AC/APs thinking in this particular business decision?

Based on the responses that several individuals here on FT, AC/AP is backed up at least 2 months in verifying flights. Clearly, they either have assigned very few individuals to this task OR it is very labour intensive process. Either way, this costs $$$

Now lets take it a step further. What percentage of missing flight credit requests are actually from individuals trying to milk the system vs individuals with a legitimate claim? Although I am sure that AC/AP will not provide those figures to us, I suspect that the vast majority of these requests are valid with these individuals rightly deserving these miles, regardless of whether they be status or non-status miles.

So the question is, how is it financially viable to integrate such an approach given the costs associated with this validation protocol?

The only way that it would be financially beneficial to AC/AP is if amount of money saved by not having to assign these credits is greater than the labour required to process missing post requests. Given the rather meagre percentage of my own flights which have posted this year and the assumption that there is a major proportion of fliers who pay little attention to whether their flights post (or fail to retain tickets stubs, etc), I suspect that this amount is not insignificant. You also have to factor in potential cost savings for individuals who fail to attain status privledges rightlyfully earned or cert thresholds because of the delay/failure to post.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist but anyone with any sort of high-tech background could easily develop a program to track such posts, regardless of differences in class fares, COS bonuses, etc. The only reason for them not to do this is if it is in their own financial interest.