User Interface By Crackheads

I know it sounds mean but you have to wonder who is making these decisions sometimes. I went to register a free account with my local newspaper today and it prompted me that I need to have it the format YYYY-MM-DD. Now who would decide to force the user to have to use that format? Why? Were they too lazy to add a few lines of code to account for the very normal US approach of MM-DD-YYYY? Are they really letting their obscure database set up dictate how the users use the system?