Many times, consumer advocates say, the investigation translates to a perfunctory check of its records.
The minuet ends with a perfunctory repetition of its main theme and the trio draws out its final cadence with a chromatic passage marked "diminuendo".
ITN's reporting is more perfunctory, but some of its stronger segments are included on the PBS "Newshour".
This year the regime curtailed even the perfunctory annual meeting of its parliament, the National People's Congress NPCC), preferring to confine discussion to back-rooms and obscure internet forums.
For all of its foodie appeal, however, "Ramen Shop" is a wispily sentimental enterprise, full of perfunctory transitions, maudlin plot twists and awkward time shifts between past and present.
After a couple of perfunctory paragraphs praising his "leadership, integrity and resilience in guiding Citi through the crisis and positioning it well for the future," the board spent most of its statement talking up Pandit's successor, Michael Corbat, a twenty-year Citi veteran who has been running the bank's extensive operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
In a tight T-shirt, lace-up pants and eyeliner, he managed to appear both smug and glum, his performance carrying an air of the perfunctory about it.
Some of it simply feels perfunctory - which, in a film as quietly passionate as this one, is surprising.
The demonizing of the rebels has gone far beyond what can possibly be justified, even as a willingness to condemn Khartoum for its years of massive atrocity crimes has in many quarters atrophied to the point of merely perfunctory criticism.
Lewis Mumford declared it a "humdrum job of engineering concealed beneath a mask of wholly perfunctory masonry".
