Having worked in jobs where you ship and receive stuff, you do certainly acquire a drawer full of strange stuff that is stuck in ownership limbo of "its not ours but we can't get it to the proper owner for one reason or another either" (especially when its an item crossing largely unrelated subsidiaries of a company)

I can 100% see a communication breakdown of "oops we need to send this back" then it not getting sent out and remaining in limbo, but the person in charge of the collection of ownership limbo items should be damn well aware that these are items that probably need to go back and should have stopped it from being auctioned off!