I definitely ran into the 'perils of volunteering' at work recently. Now I am supposed to volunteer and drive stuff, part of my job is to be proactive. But that then makes things my fault.
The situation: Company has a steadily growing profusion of different licences from the government allowing us to share technology with an overseas site. This site employs over 500 engineering staff and they are collaborating with about a thousand more locally.
I go 'Hey, this is getting really complex. Would it help if I consolidated everything into one big licence so that people did not have to remember which one to quote and record against?' A great idea! I got the go ahead, applied for it months ago, now long overdue with the government and remaining so.
Once this becomes obvious (I had given enough time if the government had stuck to their target processing times and attempted to give months more but people took a long time to confirm what they in fact wanted) I flag it up to seniors and apply for another licence to cover one of the existing ones that is due to expire and would leave hundreds of people unable to work.
Of course this one (the backup!) also goes overdue because the government is super busy (with Brexit amongst other things). Now it is my fault that 1,500 people were potentially going to have to stop working and goes down as a black mark against me even when I put together a plan to resolve it with minimal impact and finally, just, get the licence in time.
None of this was ever my responsibility to begin with