Category Archives: European IQ Trainwrecks

Quality Information – it can be a lottery!

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It’s been a little while since our last post of an IQTrainwreck. That doesn’t mean that they dont’ still occur. Only this past weekend Irish national broadcaster RTE published inaccurate information about the winning numbers in the Irish National Lottery draw at the end of the broadcast. .We’d like to show you video footage of the error but, to avoid compounding the error, RTE have edited the last few seconds from the end of the recording which is available on the RTE website.

According to The Irish Times RTE blame a software error for the incorrect display of numbers, which the broadcaster was forced to correct through continuity announcements during the remainder of the evening. Apparently a software update was applied ahead of the draw on Saturday 17th December.

The Irish National Lottery has expressed concern that anything might affect the collection of the winning prize, a trivial amount of only €4.9 million but point out that there is more than one way for a person to check their lottery numbers.

 

There are a few lessons to learn here for Information Quality Professionals

  1. When you are presenting mission critical information in time-sensitive environments, it is imperative that you have any changes to process, software, or technical architecture well tested before ‘show time’.
  2. When you are relying on the quality of information for critical decisions it is often worthwhile to take reference data points from other sources to validate and verify the source you are using, no matter how trusted or trustworthy they may have been in the past. Trust but Verify is a good mantra
  3. When using data for decision making where accuracy is a “Critical to Quality” factor you should seek out the most authoritative source. Often this mean going to the real world object or source data creator (in this case the National Lottery itself) rather than relying on a normally reliable surrogate source (the National Broadcaster in this case) in case errors or defects have crept into the data which is being presented by the surrogate.

 

 

Accounting Accountability

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From Europe we learn of two stories with similar characteristics that tick all the boxes for classic Information Quality Trainwrecks.

 

From Germany we hear that due to errors in internal accounting in the recently nationalised Hypo Real Estate, the German National debt was overstated by €55 Billion (US$76 bn approx). This was doubly embarrassing for Germany as they had spent the last while criticising the accuracy of accounting by the Greek Government.

According to the Financial Post website:

In an era of austerity where their government has squabbled tirelessly for two years over a mooted €6-billion tax cut, Germans found it hard to fathom that their government was so suddenly and unexpectedly 55-billion euros better off.

The net effect of the error being found and fixed is that Germany’s Debt to GDP ratio will be 2.6% lower than previously thought.

The root cause appears to be a failure to standardise accounting practices between two banks who were being merged as part of a restructuring of the German banking system. This resulted in the missing billions being accounted for incorrectly on the balance sheet of the German government who owns the banks in question.

From Ireland we have a similar story of missing Billions. In this case a very simple accounting error resulted in monies that were loaned from one State agency (the National Treasury Management Agency) to another State Agency (the Housing Finance Agency) being accounted for by the Department of Finance in a way which resulted in €3.6billion being added to the Irish National Debt figures.

This (almost co-incidentally) resulted in a 2% misstatement of the Irish National debt. Also co-incidentally it is exactly the same figure as the Irish Government is seeking to reduce net expenditure by in its forthcoming budget.

The problem was first spotted by the NTMA in August of last year (2010) but, despite a number of emails and phone calls from the NTMA to the Department of Finance the error was not fixed until October 2011. For some reason there was a failure in the Department to recognise the error, understand the significance, or take action on it.

The Secretary General of the Department of Finance blames middle-management:

Secretary general of the department Kevin Cardiff said the error was made at “middle management” level and was never communicated up to a more senior level. He said the department was initiating an internal inquiry to examine the issue and would establish an external review to look at the systems and to put safeguards in place to ensure such mistakes were not repeated in the future.

Information Quality Professionals of course would consider looking at the SYSTEM, and part of that is the organisation culture which is in place in the Department which prevented a significant error in information from being acted upon.

Lessons to Learn:

There are a lot of lessons to learn from these stories. Among them:

  1. When bringing data together from different organisations, particularly when those organisations are being merged, it is important to ensure y0u review and standardise the “Information Product Specification” so that everyone knows what the standard terms, business rules, and meaning of data are in the NEW organisation and ACROSS organisational boundaries. Something as simple as knowing who has to put a value in the DEBIT column and where the corresponding CREDIT needs to be put should be clearly defined. Operational Definitions of critical concepts are essential.
  2. When errors are found, there needs to be clear and open channels of communication that allow the errors to be logged, assessed, and acted on where they have a material or significant effect. Organisational cultures where internal politics or historic arrogance lead managers to assume that the issue isn’t there or isn’t their problem ultimately result in the issue becoming bigger and more difficult to deal with.
  3. Don’t shoot the messenger. Don’t blame the knowledge worker. But ensure that there are mechanisms by which people can take accountability and responsibility. And that starts at the the top.

No room at the Inn

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[UPDATE – 17 August 2012: It has been drawn to our attention that the Macroom.ie website has been redesigned since this post was written. None of the links referred to below exist on the new site. This post addresses an issue that was identified as existing on one day in 2011 but which, when we discussed with contacts in the hotel industry, we learned of similar issues where tourists arrive at a hotel believing they had a booking but had in fact booked at a different hotel of the same or similar name and URL in a different place.

The new macroom.ie website is well worth a visit and has lots of interesting information about Macroom and its surrounding localities, including my personal favourite, the Prince August factory (which I used to order moulds and metal from to make toy soldiers as a child).]

Via Twitter we came across this tale of Information Quality fun and games from the South West of Ireland.

Macroom is a popular tourist destination in Co. Cork. The local Town Council have invested in a portal website for the town Macroom.ie.  One of the boasts of Macroom is that is just 45 minutes away by car from the tourist hotspot that is Killarney, with its National Park and other attractions. (Macroom itself is home to Ireland’s only Toy Soldier factory).

 

On Macroom.ie you can link to various hotels in the locale to book accommodation. There is just one small problem.

The Riverside Park Hotel that is linked to from this site isn’t in Macroom. It is in Wexford. Over 3 hours away by car.

View Larger Map

Of course, this could have been avoided if, as part of the information creation process (i.e. building the link) some attention had been paid to the physical address of the Riverside Park Hotel and Leisure Club that was being linked to rather than selecting the first link that appears in a search for “Riverside Park Hotel Macroom” on Google (the .com variant of the .ie address already linked to here). [note that as Google search algorithms change the search results you get today may not match the results we got in August 2011]
Or, as might also be the case, the problem could have arisen now due to a back-end editing error that resulted in a typo putting “.com” in the linked-to URL rather than “.ie” and it would have been easily fixed in time.
[update- 17 August 2012] In any event, the site has been updated now to a new look and feel and the links we used to track this issue are no longer active. But it still serves as a cautionary tale for anyone creating web content to double check links to make sure they point to the intended location. [/update]

 

It could be YOU (and 44,999 others)

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The Irish National Lottery had an embarrassment last week when their Bank Holiday promotion draw went awry.

As part of a special draw for the August Bank Holiday weekend, the Lottery were offering a prize of a Jaguar XK convertible as an additional prize to the person who won the jackpot.

Unfortunately, due to apparent “human error” the National Lottery Company informed anyone who checked their numbers on-line and had matched any combination of numbers that they had won the car, even if the money value of the prize was as little as €5.00. They hadn’t, but the story still made headline news. Some outlets report that disgruntled non-winners are considering legal action.

It is important to have validation checks in place on reports and publication of data, particularly where that data would be of value or could be relied upon to the detriment of another person.

Unhealthy Healthcare data

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For a change (?) it is nice (?) to see stories about healthcare IQ Trainwrecks that don’t necessarily involve loss of life, injury, tears, or trauma.

Today’s Irish Examiner newspaper carries a story of the financial impacts of poor quality data in healthcare administration. At a time when the budgets for delivery of healthcare in Ireland are under increasing pressure due to the terms of the EU/IMF bailout of Ireland, it is essential that the processes for processing payments operate efficiently. It seems they do not:

  1. Staff continued to be paid pensions where they retired from one role and then re-entered the Health Service in a different role (HSE South)
  2. Absence of Controls meant staff who were on sick leave with pension entitlements being paid continued to be paid when they returned to work (HSE South)
  3. Pensions were calculated off incorrect bases for staff who were on secondment/shared with other agencies (HSE South)
  4. Inaccurate data about the ages of dependents resulted in overpayments of death in service benefits (HSE South).
  5. “Inappropriate” filing systems were resulting in “needlessly incurring wastage of scarce resources” (HSE Dublin/Mid Lenister)

 

Poor quality information costs between 10% and 35% of turnover in the average organisation. So the HSE may not be too bad. But the failure of controls and processes resulting in poor quality data leading to financial impacts is all too familiar.

The Wrong Arm of the (f)Law

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Courtesy of Steve Tuck and Privacy International comes this great story from the UK of how a simple error, if left uncorrected, can result in significantly unwelcome outcomes. It is also a cautionary tale for those of us who might think that flagging a record as being “incorrect” or inaccurate might solve the problem… such flags are only as good as the policing that surrounds them.
Matthew Jillard lives on Repton Road in a suburb of Birmingham. In the past 18 months he has been raided over 40 times by the police. During Christmas week he was raided no fewer than 5 times, with some “visits” taking place at 3am and 5am, disturbing him, his family, his family’s guests, his neighbours, his neighbour’s guests….
According to Mr Jillard,
9 times out of 10 they are really apologetic.
Which suggests that 1 time out of 10 the visiting police might annoyed at Mr Jillard for living at the wrong address(??)
The root cause: The police are confusing Mr Jillard’s address with a house around the corner on Repton Grove.
(scroll the map to the right to find Repton Grove)
Clancy Wiggum from the Simpsons
Not a spokesman for West Midlands Police

View larger map
Complaints to the police force in question have been met with apologies and assurances that the police have had training on how important it is to get the address right for a search. Some officers have blamed their Sat Nav for leading them astray.
Given the cost to the police of mounting raids, getting it wrong 40 times will be putting a dent in their budget. Also, the costs to the police of putting right any damages done to Mr Jillard’s home due to the incorrect raids (which have included kicking in his door at 3am on Christmas Day) will also be mounting up.
The police have said that “measures” have been taken to prevent Mr Jillard’s home being raided, including putting a marker against his address on the police computer systems. None of these measures appear to have stopped the raids, which come at an average frequency of more than one a fortnight (40 raids in 18 months).
This Trainwreck highlights the impact of apparently simple errors in data:
  1. Mr Jillard’s home is being disturbed without cause on a frequent basis
  2. His neighbours must be increasingly suspicious of him, what with the police calling around more often than the milkman
  3. The police force is incurring costs and wasting man power with a continuing cycle of fruitless raids.
  4. The real target of the raids are now probably aware of the fact that the police are looking for them and will have moved their activities away from Repton Grove.

8 year old orphaned by a fat finger key stroke error

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Daragh O Brien has written and presented in the past for the IAIDQ on the topic of how the legal system and information quality management often look at the same issues from a different perspective, ultimately to identify how to address the issues of the cost and risk of poor quality.

This was brought home very starkly this morning in a case from the UK High Court which has opened the possibility of six figure damages being awarded to an 8 year old boy who was orphaned by a data quality error.

A single key stroke error on a computer cost a mother her life from breast cancer and left her eight-year-old son an orphan, the High Court has heard.

Two urgent letters informing the single mother of hospital appointments were sent to the wrong address – because the number of her home was typed as ’16’, instead of ‘1b’.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366056/Mistyped-address-leaves-mother-dead-cancer-son-8-orphan.html#ixzz1GfRPOOHJ

In a tragic series of events a young mother discovered a lump on her breast. She was treated in hospital and given the all clear, but continued to be concerned. Her GP arranged further tests for her but she never received the letters due to a simple mis-keying of her address which meant she never received her appointment letters. As her cancer went untreated for a further 12 months by the time she was diagnosed her only treatment option was palliative care. Had she been treated in time, the Court heard, she would have had a 92% chance of survival for another 10 years.

Her doctor admitted liability arising from the failure of the surgery to follow up with the the woman on her tests, which might have uncovered that she hadn’t received the letters.

The Court dismissed an argument by the defence that the woman should have followed up herself, on the grounds that, while they would never know what had been in her mind, she had already been given an “all clear” and that she was likely either trying to get on with her life or may have been scared to return to the doctor.

A key lesson to be learned here is that ensuring accurate information is captured at the beginning of a process is critical. Equally critical is the need for organisations where the data is potentially of life and death importance to ensure that there is follow up where the process appears to have stalled (for example if expected test results are not received back from a hospital).

A simple error in data input, and a failure of or lack of error detection processes, has been found by the UK High Court to be the root cause for the death of a young mother and the orphaning of an 8 year old boy.  This is a SIGNIFICANT legal precedent.

Also, the case raises Data Protection Act compliance issues for the GP practice as sensitive personal data about a (now deceased) patient was sent to the wrong address.

RELATED POST: Daragh O Brien has a related post on his personal blog from 2009 about how Information Quality is getting some interesting legal support in the English legal system.

So exactly HOW pregnant is he?

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From the #dataquality correspondents on Twitter comes this great story of a classic IQ Trainwreck.

Hilton Plettell is pregnant and is expected to deliver in 7 months, according to the NHS. They’ve invited him to a scan to see his bundle of joy.

Yes. We did say HIM and HIS, because Hilton is a 50 year old department store merchandising manager. But that is not the end of the IQ Trainwreck here.

  1. The hospital he was directed to is 162 miles from his home (a long way to travel with the full bladder needed for an ultrasound scan).
  2. A sticker attached to the letter correctly identified Mr Plettell as being Male.

So, 3 errors or inconsistencies in the letter which indicate a Data Quality kerfuffle in the NHS (at least in Norwich).

A spokesperson for the hospital thanked Mr Plettell for raising the issue with them and indicated they were undertaking a Root Cause Analysis to see where their processes and procedures could be improved to prevent this type of obvious error.

We can’t help but wonder if the root cause might be similar to the problem encountered by DataQualityPro.com’s Dylan Jones last year, which we reported here in June 2009.

The story is covered in the Daily Male  Mail, which reproduces a picture of Mr Plettell’s hospital letter (but that image is copyright so we can’t republish it here).

Organ Donor Records Mix-up

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The Sunday Times reported in April 2010 that NHS Blood and Transplant, who run the UK organ donor register, last year wrote to new donors with their consent details. After respondents complained the information was incorrect it was discovered 800,000 individuals’ details had been recorded incorrectly. 45 of those affected have since died and their incorrect wishes carried out!

“The mistake occurred in 1999 when a coding error on driving licences wrongly specifying donors’ wishes was transferred to the organ registry.”

400,000 of the affected records have been changed, and the remaining 400,000 people will be contacted soon and asked to update their consent.

Zero Entertainment in Norway

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This story comes from our Norwegian Correspondent, Mr. Arnt-Erik Hansen (former IAIDQ Director of Member Services). We let him tell his tale in his own words, with only minor editing….

++++

Norway is the only country in the world, as far as I know, with full transparency with regards to personal income, wealth and state tax. One of the big Autumnal Entertainments in Norway is the annual publication of the list of taxpayers, their incomes, and the amount of tax they have paid. . Here you can search for your neighbor, your friends, enemies, public companies or government officials to find what their income was, how much they contributed to the state and how wealthy they are. On October 20, 2010 the list was published on the internet

Newspapers, TV, and blogs (including this one) find this a great event to generate stories.  Every year there are stories about the person earning the least and the most. Not only that, they compare a person’s income to the average income in the country, according to your age. They will even go as far as determining the street in Norway with the lowest average income. This is business intelligence on real live data.

However the Norwegian tax authorities are not immune to data quality problems. Here are some of the stories I read in the newspapers today (all online of course [editor: Links to the stories will be posted here soon])

A polish citizen, address in Polen and with a modest Norwegian income is reported to have paid more than 119’000’000 Norwegian Kroner (approx US$20.4 million, or €14.6million ) in taxes for 2009. As a consequence he can claim to be the biggest contributor to the state coffers. Thanks Polen, I am sure that someone will be there to collect the money soon.

This is of course wrong and the reason is, most likely, that someone punched in the wrong number – a number with too many zeros. We’ll call this “The Fat Finger Zero Error“.

Apart from errors in the data itself, there appear to be errors in the actual interpretation of the data. For example, a lady working as a cleaner got a tax claim of no less than 84’005’501 Norwegian Kroner (€10.3million or US$14.4million). Her income for 2009 was reported by one newspaper to be 324’000 (US$55,600, or €39,818) so this is an obvious error. Another newspaper reported her income to be 240’000.

A key question is: What has happened here?

The answer from the tax authorities when asked to comment on this was simply – errors happen, unfortunately, and will be corrected immediately. However, the reason was, most likely, that someone punched in the wrong number – a number with too many zeros. Well, seems that someone has a problem with zeros.

There is another story to come about the “Fat Finger Zero” error.  But first we need to share some insight into the tax reporting and collection process in Norway works.

It’s not too different to any other country. Except in Norway the State sends you your forms filled in with the information the tax authorities have about you and you simply have to sign them and send them back.  And, like most tax authorities, they most likely know more about you than yourself.

For instance, banks in Norway send megabytes of data about all customers and their accounts to the tax authorities. Which leads us to our third IQTrainwreck example in this story…

This year two banks managed to put zeros behind the customer account balances instead of in front for 500 customers.  So €00000500 became €500,0000.

A possible root cause: the definition of the attributes in the file has gone astray.

But from two banks?

Or was the requirement wrong?

It  seems that Norway has a problem with zeros.

Oh, almost forgot to mention – today the Norwegian State Fund was valued above the 3’000 Billion mark for the first time. That’s 3’000’000’000’000 Norwegian Kroner (US$514,610,220,303).

I think I understand the problems with zeros. (But how much of that is due to tax collection errors? – the sting in the tail for Norwegian tax payers is that if there is an error in their tax calculations they have to pay the decided amount and then are refunded the amount of any error).

PS! If you look up my name you will find income 0, wealth 0 and taxes 0. The reason: I lived in Switzerland in 2009 and in that country you are invited to pay taxes and it is not a criminal offence if you don’t tell the state everything.