In all fairness to the DBA, this situation might be a reacton to the IT environment; for example office politics, the incentive program, or micromanagement on the part of upper level executive managment. What this means is that issues which impact business operations or issues that are initially reported by external users will get entered into the tracking system and are visible at all management levels. However, things the DBA team discovers, things like automated processes requiring occasional manual intervention or scheduled processes that go bump in the night due to blocking, this type of thing may get fixed off the books to create the illusion of a well oiled machine.

I'm not saying this is the right thing to do; I'm just saying it's common and not necessarily confined to the worst staff membes or teams. Management and IT need to work together to foster an environment of openness, understanding, and support.