I can believe it. Once upon a time, a friend of mine at one of the largest oil companies told me how they were passing around a complex spreadsheet with tons of tabs and formulas and it was for managing the budgets of all their chemical plants around the world. I tried to explain how I could just put it all into a database and whip up a front end for it, but he said there's no way a consultant like me could get anywhere near his department since all firms had to be vetted extensively, there'd be a big RFP, etc, and anyway it sounds like they thought Excel was just fine for managing all this money.