Happy Halloween! Six Scary Spreadsheet Errors
To help get you in the Halloween spirit, here are six scary stories of real-life spreadsheet errors:
An asset depreciation accounting error, among others, led to the restating of years of earnings, impacting shareholder confidence and leading to the CEO’s resignation.
Barclays
When Barclays acquired assets from Lehman Brothers, it included a spreadsheet with hidden rows detailing 179 contracts they did not want. The case went to court and Barclays lost, costing the company dearly.
Created a new value at risk (VaR) model for their hedging strategy based on a spreadsheet. The model was used, but there was a lot of copying and pasting over several spreadsheets, which impacted their formulas and lowered the perceived risk of assets. The company posted losses of $2B that year.
Research by Harvard that paying down debt was important for economic recovery was embraced widely by politicians. That notion was weakened by the authors’ acknowledgment that they made an error in a spreadsheet. The findings went from an average growth in high-debt countries of -0.1 percent to 2.2 percent growth.
Earlier this year one particular spreadsheet infamously made headlines when a frustrated husband kept a list of the number of times he and his wife had sex over two months. While this isn’t a technical error, it is a frightful error in judgment.
Just last month, spreadsheet errors cost Tibco shareholders $100M. Goldman Sachs Group, Tibco’s adviser in a deal where the company sold to Vista Equity Partners for $4B, used a spreadsheet that overstated the company’s share count by $100M.
If you’re using a spreadsheet to make major business decisions, or sharing the spreadsheet with someone, it doesn’t have to be scary. Get visibility and create confidence in your spreadsheet data with Incisive spreadsheet management solutions.
Happy Halloween!
