“2.33.3. The booking structure relied upon by the UK operations of Credit Suisse for the CDO trading business was complex and overly reliant on large spreadsheets with multiple entries. This resulted in a lack of transparency and inhibited the effective supervision, risk management and control of the SCG {Structured Credit Group}”

The Nevada city budget spreadsheet apparently worked correctly until sometime in late December 2005 when, city finance director Ron Chandler says, it developed a problem, causing the 2006 budget to show a $5 million deficit in the water and sewer fund. Chandler said that it took him most of the day Wednesday to fix the problem. While he was working on it he found some other errors in the spreadsheet that needed to be corrected. "Once it's a PDF it can't change," Chandler said.

Westpac was forced to halt trading on its shares and deliver its annual profit briefing a day early after it accidentally sent its results by email to research analysts. Details of the $2.818 billion record profit result for the 12 months to September 30, were embedded in a template of last year's results and were accessible with minor manipulation of the spreadsheet. (Some reports indicated an employee had thought that a black cell background fill would hide black text.) Mr Chronican said "It is not just one error, it is a compounding of two or three errors … We will obviously be conducting a full inquiry to make sure it doesn't happen again."

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - The hefty $11 million severance error was traced to a faulty spreadsheet. Kodak spokesman Gerard Meuchner said "There were too many zeros added to the employee's accrued severance. But it was an accrual. There was never a payment," he said. Robert Brust, Kodak's chief financial officer, called it ” an internal control deficiency that constitutes a material weakness that impacted the accounting for restructurings."

The Center for Regional Strategies recently confirmed that a researcher's errant cut-and-paste from a spreadsheet caused one measure of the region's level of educational attainment to appear a lot worse than it is. The Center for Regional Strategies, a self-described "think-and-do tank" housed at Virginia Tech, reported that a dismal 11 percent of the region's population older than 25 had bachelor's degrees or higher. That number should have been 20 percent. Stuart Mease, a spokesman for the Center for Regional Strategies, said "It was just a simple cut-and-paste error," he said. "I don't know how it happened, but it did. We apologize for our mistake and want to correct it."

Shares of RedEnvelope Inc. tumbled more than 25 percent Tuesday after the online retailer of specialty gifts drastically reduced its fourth-quarter outlook and said its chief financial officer will resign in April. Stanford Group analyst Rebecca Jones Kujawa said in an interview. "...they were underestimating the cost of goods sold....it is likely CFO Eric Wong is being pushed out because of this error, which could demonstrate a material weakness in controls over financial reporting, an issue that usually leads to a lengthy review of accounting practices." RedEnvelope spokeswoman Jordan Goldstein said the budgeting error was simply due to a number mis-recorded in one cell of a spreadsheet that then threw off the cost forecast and was unrelated to the CFO change.

University of Toledo loses $2.4M in projected revenue. "While official UT projections call for a 10 percent decline in graduate student enrollment, an increase mistakenly was shown in a spreadsheet formula that led officials to overestimate enrollment and therefore revenue, Mr. Decatur said." "Dr. Johnson said no job action will be taken against the employee who made the mistake, who has a good performance record. Officials will, however, pursue systemic changes to provide more safeguards in the future. "We have very competent people," Dr. Johnson said. "I do think that the continuing fiscal pressures on universities have forced us to a level of staff support where there is little or no redundancy in the process."

Fannie Mae filed a Form 8-K/A with the SEC amending their third quarter press release to correct computational errors in that release. "There were honest mistakes made in a spreadsheet used in the implementation of a new accounting standard. The bottom line is that the correction has no impact on our income statement, but resulted in increases to unrealized gains on securities, accumulated other comprehensive income, and total shareholder equity (of $1.279 billion, $1.136 billion, and $1.136 billion, respectively)... the correction had to do with a computational error in performing complicated calculations required in the implementation of FAS 149."

TransAlta Corp. said on Tuesday it will take a $24 million charge to earnings after a bidding snafu landed it more U.S. power transmission hedging contracts than it bargained for, at higher prices than it wanted to pay. [...] the company's computer spreadsheet contained mismatched bids for the contracts, it said. "It was literally a cut-and-paste error in an Excel spreadsheet that we did not detect when we did our final sorting and ranking bids prior to submission," TransAlta chief executive Steve Snyder said in a conference call. "I am clearly disappointed over this event. The important thing is to learn from it, which we've done." As New York ISO rules did not allow for a reversal of the bids, the contracts went ahead.

Allfirst “Would not pay the US$ 10,000 for a direct data feed from Reuters to the risk control section”. Instead, they got Rusnak to download his Reuters feed into a spreadsheet. He then substituted links to his private manipulated spreadsheet. The total losses hidden by the fraud were almost US$700M. Rusnak exaggerated bonuses by over half a million dollars. Ray Butler points out in the article above that "One error in a spreadsheet will subvert all the controls in all the systems feeding into it". An auditing tool (SpACE) would have found the external links in the key spreadsheet.

“Poor control over spreadsheets at Jamaican indigenous banks contributed to management information and external reporting problems (i.e., P&L distortions) that contributed to the banks' management and external regulators losing sight of the banks' true positions and exposures. This problem fed a downward spiral into liquidity crisis”[Lemieux, 2005] “As the Jamaican financial crisis unfolded, the government also recognised that fraud and corruption had contributed to the collapse of indigenous banks. To address these allegations, it established a team of foreign and local forensic auditors to work with the police fraud squad to identify and take action on instances of fraud. Inaccessibility of source documents, however, seriously hampered the auditors' work. The work of reconstructing what in some cases were very convoluted financial transactions was made extremely difficult by the fact that critical records, many in spreadsheet form, were missing”. [Lemieux, 2005]

"There was a big flap recently over Fidelity's Magellan fund estimating in November that they would make a $4.32/share distribution at the end of year, and then not doing so. A letter of explanation was sent to the shareholders (including me) from J. Gary Burkhead, the President of Fidelity, including the following pertinent items: "During the estimating process, a tax accountant is required to transcribe the net realized gain or loss from the fund's financial records (which were correct at all times) to a separate spreadsheet, where additional calculations are performed. The error occurred when the accountant omitted the minus sign on a net capital loss of $1.3 billion and incorrectly treated it as a net capital gain on this separate spreadsheet. This meant that the dividend estimate spreadsheet was off by $2.6 billion...

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