it was like this when i worked at a software dev consulting company. in most cases the ix-nay on unit/acceptance tests came from the client, because our salesmen would say "it will cost 200$k more if you want us to write a complete set of unit and acceptance tests for your project".
so most client companies would say "we just want to pay for the site, not some stupid tests". and then we would hurriedly mash out some buggy site, have business analysts manually "test" it, and release a piece of crap to production to make the deadline. then the salesmen would push a long-term maintenance contract for big $$$, they would buy it to make the site actually work, and we would end up with more money than if we had just worked with the client in the first place to find out and test for what they really wanted.