The IT Compliance Institute carries a story on their website as of 6th July that like the monster in all good horror movies, Enron has had one last spurt of scandalousness.

“After nearly $89 million was paid to former Enron employees to replace money they lost in employee stock ownership and 401(k) plans when the company collapsed in 2001, nearly $22 million has been found to have been miscalculated due to a software problem.”

That’s nearly 25% of a miscalculation, so it qualifies as a trainwreck. The fact that it affected people’s wallets doubly qualifies it, and that it happened in the vicinity of the Enron blast-crater seals the deal… this is an Information Quality Trainwreck.
Intrigued, I read further to see if the story identified what the nature of this software glitch was. Was it a poor choice of platform? Was it poorly written code or a failure to test? None of the above.

The ITCI tells us that the root cause of the problem was actually an incorrect stock price used in calculations. The software would appear to have done what it was supposed to do – or rather we can’t say that the software didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Garbage was put in, and garbage was returned out.

This resulted in “about 7,700” workers being overpaid. They’ll now have to pay back money to the pension fund that collapsed when Enron imploded. A further 12,800 are reported as having been underpaid.

This is an example of the real impacts of apparently minor information quality errors. This was also totally avoidable.As Information Quality trainwrecks go this is a good example. There are a number of levels at which sound IQ practices might not have been followed in this example. Readers are invited to comment with their thoughts on what might or might not have been appropriate here.

The article does not make any mention of the scrap and rework costs involved in identifying the overpaid and underpaid individuals or the personal trauma costs that could have resulted from people getting less money than they thought they were getting (the underpaid) or from people having to suddenly find the funds to repay their overpayments.