OK. And I see that from your original post, they are probably typing in the account number for the distribution (rather than using the finder), and thus the first department automatically populates the field, which was not desiree here.

They can always over-type the department if they are doing keyboard entry, just as if the department was blanked out, since the automatically inserted department is highlighted. Is this just that they don't like the display of the auto-inserted department, or is there an actual problem that occurs because of this?