Re: Similar situation
The outside auditors had arrived to sign off on the annual accounts, and were demanding to physically see various items listed on the assets register.
If that was the late 1990's you should have asked for the asset numbers of the rocks they had been living under for the 10 years at least since software licenses for that kind of stuff came into being. VMS started requiring software licenses for the OS and layered products from version 5 on, and while you could show the output of $ LICENSE LIST, you also got nice paper certificates with the registration codes to put in a binder and hand over to the auditors.