Has this happened to you?
My firm submitted materials for a presentation to a client weeks before it was scheduled, sending them to the contact’s assistant, and asking that if there were any problems, to let us know. The day before the presentation, I received an urgent e-mail from the assistant, reading, “I am copying you in on this because I had not heard from your partner. The materials you sent may need revisions, as I informed her in my previous communication, and we were getting concerned because the revisions had not been received by us.” CC’d on the message were the assistant’s supervisor (my contact), and other firm members. Not my partner, however.
Panic ensued at ProEthics. After checking all phone logs, e-mail files and spam-blockers, it became abundantly clear that no such message about revisions was ever sent to my partner. The truth, I am certain, is that the assistant failed to relay his boss’s message to us in a timely fashion, then was asked, with a deadline looming, about our response regarding revisions we had never been told were necessary. His method of avoiding accountability for dropping the ball was to send a message to me referring to my partner’s alleged lack of response to a non-existent e-mail that he never sent, thus shifting the blame to her for his own negligence. The copies went only to those among his superiors who he needed to convince that we, and not he, were the ones at fault.
There is, of course, no way for me to prove that the assistant never sent the message, though the fact that he didn’t attach it to the e-mail to me is strong circumstantial evidence. There was no up-side to getting in a dispute with a client’s staff, so I politely took responsibility. (As it happened, no revisions were necessary.)
The Phantom E-mail (or phone call) is undoubtedly one of the most effective unethical methods of shifting blame when one has botched essential communication: plausible, hard to expose, and easily executed. It is so common, in fact, that I think supervisors in the position of my contact have an obligation to ask, “Show me the e-mail.” This inductee into the Unethical C.Y.A. Trick Hall of Fame need to be extinct, and making that demand routine should do it.
Ethics Alarms 
I have been called out on this before. When I was younger I was in charge of replying to emails sent to the company website by potential clients. I replied with the typical form email and follow up phone calls as our policy dictated. Due to a variety of factors (my lack of experience, changing economy, competition in the field) my success in converting emails sent to us into clients was lower than the target rate. My boss asked for the emails to see if I had actually sent them. Since I had sent emails and had an accurate phone call log, he knew I was doing my job, the question then was was I actually any good at it. I wasn’t, but I tried :).