I'm a contractor and have worked for many different clients over the past couple decades; I find that many workplaces do that sort of thing. There are reasons to lock down certain functions, but some folks seem to have a reflex to lock down everything except a few items, rather than the more sensible path of locking down only the options they know to be a risk. For example, I use the Dvorak keyboard layout rather than QWERTY. Some places have that locked down, too, so I have to spend the first few days of any gig finding the right person who can give me special permission to do perfectly risk-free things.
However, it isn't clear to me that this should be causing you a problem in this case. No matter what regional settings you pick, Excel will not read every date format in a CSV and preserve it inside Excel. That's the nature of a CSV; it's just a plain text file, and formatting is not retained.
The real question, as I see it, is this: When you take that CSV and import it into the other application (and what is that other application, by the way?), how does it see it? If it knows it's a date, and can correctly identify which parts are the year, month and day, then you should be able to go on from there. No?
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