An A320 Captain reports on his company's practice of assigning departure delays to flight crews when many delays are clearly a maintenance issue.

Narrative

Upon accessing aircraft cockpit discovered aircraft in faulted status. Had deferral on the A320 aircraft that required maintenance to check avionics cooling and issue a new maintenance release prior to every flight. Station was unaware of the problem and had powered the aircraft and left it in an avionics fault state. Maintenance Control had not coordinated for maintenance locally. ZZZ station had not coordinated for local maintenance. Local maintenance was notified and they worked with Maintenance Control to clear the issue and allow a new maintenance release to be issued.The avionics cooling system FAILED the first maintenance reset and had to be reset again. During that reset another system failed and maintenance had to reset it as well. Finally allowed complete access to our workplace and departed; I believe; one minute late. Checked with Dispatch after one hour of flight and NO delay code had been assigned. When I reported for my next days flight I checked and discovered that a cockpit checklist DELAY had been assigned to our flight. Checked with an assistant Chief Pilot and made four phone calls on my own and discovered that Maintenance Control is TEFLON. They have an AUTOMATIC software program that REJECTS DELAY CODES assigned to Maintenance. The delay code is placed on the station in this case. ZZZ Station does not have a Company domicile oversight. ZZZ Station decided to assign the delay to the [flight] crew. This problem happened over a weekend so the delay code remained and was not changeable.Pilots are under scrutiny for delays. My flight was AUTOMATICALLY charged with a delay. This situation is unacceptable. How can we be assigned a DELAY BEHIND our backs - especially when this delay was clearly a FAILURE on maintenance and Maintenance Control's part? The pilot group needs the same automatic rejection software that Maintenance Control has implemented to level the playing field. I am just thankful that while these games were being played that the avionics did not suffer heat damage and have to be replaced.