When contractors get buckets of money from the government, for their own purposes and maybe for contract legality purposes, they have to allocate/ specify how that money is spent towards each aspect of an effort. So they break a program down into tasks, and assign specific pots of money towards each task with an associated code to enter when you log your time working on those tasks.

So someone in the management of his current program got obsessed with how every single dollar was spent, and decided they needed to triple the amount of charge codes they had to more closely track the work. It sounded annoying as fuck. But it was also annoying as fuck to have to discuss something so trivial for hours.