Category Archives: USA IQ Train Wrecks

Another error from a wunch of bankers…

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The Register has this interesting story… a man in Georgia USA received a letter from his bank shortly after he closed his account with them. He believed he had cleared any outstanding charges so was a little bit surprised when he received a letter from the bank insisting he owed them $211 trillion dollars. This is just over 23 times the national debt of the United States (as at 4th Dec 2007).

The letter received by the unfortunate man also informed him that the information regarding his debt would be passed to a credit scoring agency. As this is apparently an automated process the ex-account holder has resigned himself to it appearing on his credit report at some point in the future.

The bank has apologised and has assured the recipient that his details have not been passed on. The bank’s stated root cause for this error was a “word processing error” (how quaint, they seem to still write each individual letter by hand. No mail merge?) and that this was an isolated case.

There is no information whether the poor recipient of this letter has considered suing the bank for the shock and awe that their letter may have caused, or the potential damage to his credit rating if the bank bungles the fix of their bungling.

At $211 trillion dollars this counts as a trainwreck, and is the counterbalance to the story we had a while ago about the Australian man and his uncontrolled overdraft.

We all know toddlers are terrors…

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… but this story (again culled from The Register.co.uk) shows the lengths the US government goes to to stop these known terrors from getting on planes via the Terrorist Screening lists maintained by the Dept Homeland Security.

“USA Today tells the story of a Disney World-loving 6-year-old who shares a name with someone on the “additional screening” list. Little John Anderson hasn’t made it onto the cleared list because his mum finds the TRIP web site confusing.”

So Little Johnny Anderson can’t fly to Disney World without having to prove he isn’t a terrorist. Hard to do for a tired and pissed off six year old, as any parent will tell you. I can only imagine how they explain it to him:

Mommy Anderson: Now Johnny, the nice TSA man only wants to make sure you won’t try to fly a plane into the Magic Kingdom and kill Goofy

L’il Johnny: Whhaaaaaahhhhhh…. iwannagoseegoofynmickeynminniendonalducknowmommy…whahhhh (Johnny kicks TSA agent… join us next week for L’il Johnny goes to Cuba).

Processes are in place for people to get themselves taken of the list via a website… but Johnny’s mother finds the website confusing. Having looked at the site it doesn’t seem to have any clear process entry point for “The US Government thinks (correctly) my child is a terrorist but good God I can keep them under control, please let us go to Disney”. It would seem that Mommy Anderson might need to get L’il Johnny to fill out a form to allow her to make a complaint on his behalf. He’s six. He may not understand that words like pursuant, perjury or that if he lies on the form he could to prison until he is ELEVEN!!

So the process to correct errors in the information is not customer focussed. Mommy Anderson and L’il Johnny just have to put up with his being on a watch list because the process to correct the list isn’t friendly to the information consumer/creator.

L’il Johnny isn’t alone. The Register points out that he shares his story with Javaid Iqbal, a seven year old British boy who was stopped repeatedly at US airports when on holiday in Florida (which if you are seven years old translates as Disneyland). He shared his name with someone who had been deported from the US. His name was shared, not his age. L’il Javaid’s passport is now stamped that he underwent high level security checks, pretty much condemning him to a life of Eurostar trips to EuroDisney from now on. Imagine if his name had been Lee Harvey Oswald.

These are the easy funny stories that highlight weaknesses in the quality of information and processes in this important function of the US Dept of Homeland Security. A less funny story is that

  1. There is some confusion about how big these lists are… a government report says 7555000, but a spokesman for the TSA says that he thinks it is less than half that
  2. 97% of people who have managed to get through the process that Mommy Anderson finds confusing are simply namesakes of people on the lists.
  3. Less than half of the requests to be taken off the lists (to correct inaccuracy in information and improve quality) have been processed since the facility went ‘live’ in February.  41% are “still being discussed” or are awaiting further documentation to prove the claims of the people who complained.

Why is this an IQTrainwreck?

  1. The level of inaccuracy in the information causes disruption to people… L’il Johnny or L’il Javaid won’t understand what is going on. And in Javaid’s case it may actually affect his ability to re-enter the US (or other countries) in later life.
  2. There appears to be a lack of consolidated governance and control… not being able to answer “how many names are on the lists” and get a consistent response is like asking a company how many customers are in their CRM systems and getting mixed responses….( ohhh – bad example).
  3. The processes for correcting information are not ‘customer friendly’ and don’t seem to cater for the existence of children with names who might be too young to understand the processes or even the forms. The fact that parents find the process difficult to navigate suggests there is scope for improvement.

In any other context I’d be in favour of any measure that keeps screaming children off planes, particularly long flights (by which I mean any flight that lasts longer than 6 minutes).

However, I am reminded in these cases of why my father (a civil servant in the Irish Republic and, at the time, a senior trade unionist) used to hate going on trips to the North of Ireland.  Every so often some British Army squaddie or RUC officer would take him out of the car or off the bus for questioning because:

  • He had glasses
  • He had a beard
  • He wasn’t speaking with an English accent
  • therefore he must be Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein and his id papers must be faked.

My parents had a hard time explaining that to the snotty-nosed crying kids in the back seat…

Nuclear warheads go AWOL on a B-52

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Various media (see below for links) have reported the story of the Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs) that were flown from a base in North Dakota to a base in Louisiana, apparently by accident, and sat relatively unguarded at both bases for a number of hours before the error was noticed. The flight was supposed to have taken non-nuclear ACMs on the journey to Louisiana to be decommissioned.

The root cause: An Airforce investigation uncovered that the ground crews who loaded the planes had abandoned the formal process for managing the loading and unloading of missiles in favour of their own ‘informal’ system. The Chairwoman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces sub-committee was quoted as saying:

“These are not just rules that people dreamed up … just so they could check off the boxes,” she said. “This is fundamentally important to the security of the country and the world.”

The coverage from boston.com gives some detail on the various process checks that appear to have been missed or skipped.

The impact:

The potential impact in terms of the risk of nuclear material being stolen or the risk of nuclear contamination if the planes had crashed (the warheads would not have exploded) were thankfully avoided in this case.

However, the impacts have been severe on the careers of those involved. According to the AP Wire service (via AOL), four officers have been relieved of their commands, 65 Airmen have been de-certified from handling nuclear materials and the entire 5th Bomb Wing has been “de-certified from its wartime mission”. Which apparently was not to misplace nukes. Some media services report that the Airforce is planning to fire some of those involved.

Perhaps worryingly the original count of missiles that arrived in Louisiana was put at five and then later upgraded to six.

A conspiracy theorist’s dreamscape if ever we saw one.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2396127.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/21/wnuke121.xml

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/10/20/4_colonels_relieved_of_command_over_nuclear_armed_flight/

An Enron Zombie rises from the grave

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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.

TB or not TB (with apologies to Shakespeare)

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The Irish Examiner newspaper today carried this story about an American lawyer who was let back into the US despite being red-flagged as a health risk.

It would seem that he had acquired a particularly nasty drug-resistant form of Tuberculosis – a diagnosis which was confirmed in Europe where he was travelling. He was advised not to travel and to seek treatment. Being a sensible personal injury lawyer with an understanding of duty of care to others who might be harmed by his actions and causal chains in litigation, he jumped on the next flight out.

Despite warnings from US health officials not to board another long flight, he flew home for treatment, fearing he would not survive if he did not reach the US, he said. He said he tried to sneak home by way of Canada instead of flying directly into the US.

When he got to the US/Canadian border his passport swipe popped a big red flag that advised the Border guard to restrain him, to prevent him from entering the US and to don a protective mask when dealing with this lawyer. The border guard promptly waved him through, despite the medical advice to hold him and quarantine him, because…

the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely “discretionary”.

While the guard is not a doctor, their future career as a border guard may also be in question (they are currently on ‘administrative duties’). The union representing the guard in question has gone on record saying that “public health issues are not receiving adquate attention and training” within the Dept of Homeland Security.

The right information was in the right place at the right time. It was accurate. However through a disregard for process the information was without value and the border security process didn’t work as expected. That disregard for process may have had a root cause in a failure of training to either cover the public health issue or a failure of the organisation to emphasise that the role of Homeland Security is to protect against threats – not just terrorist ones.

Sometimes an IQ Trainwreck just gets you in the …

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Over on the website of Information Impact (Larry P. English’s consulting firm) a list of “Publicly exposed IQ Problems” is maintained. Occasionally we like to pop over and see what Larry’s people have spotted in the media that we might have missed.

One that got the (male) administrator of this site right in the *ahem* was the story of a US Army veteran who had the wrong testicle removed in a Veterans Administration Hospital. It seems that a chain of small errors resulted in the surgeon confidently and competently removing the wrong gonad. Gonad… I’d goMad.

The interesting thing on the USA Today blog site is that in the related stories they link to a Washington Post story that says that “wrong site surgery” (in other words accidentally cutting off perfectly functioning body parts or the right part off the wrong person) could be up to 20 times more common than previously thought. However they also link to a press release from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (an American organisation) detailing a study that shows wrong site surgery to be less common than previously thought.

This contradiction in statistics is itself an IQ Trainwreck – either there is a problem which should be addressed with expidition or there isn’t a problem. The fact that reliable information appears not to be available (perhaps through non-reporting of the issue in some cases) means that the ‘customers’ of healthcare services in the US don’t have information that meets, let alone exceeds, their expectations.

At least the two reports agree that these errors are preventable.

Of course wrong site surgery never happens outside the USA. Apart from:

the Irish man who had his stomach removed in error due to a mix up in tissue samples (no, that is not the set up to a humorous punchline). In this case doctors went to the extent of sending the tissue samples to an outside laboratory to get the diagnosis confirmed before operating (a 21 year old man was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer). However the defect in the process/information had occured so early in the chain of events that their ‘stop and check’ actions simply confirmed the incorrect diagnosis leading to an extreme result for the young man in question.