A diary item reports mysterious deductions of 25 cents a time from American credit cards. Some kind of fraud is suspected
As undergraduates we were taught that the first (known) computer fraud on a bank took place when a programmer inserted a piece of code which paid all the rounding errors into his own account. Teeny tiny amounts, fractions of a cent. But it all adds up
Something similar, in the opposite direction, happens when very large sums of money are involved. When I was monitoring a multi-billion budget we worked in amounts rounded to the nearest £5million. If somebody got too cavalier about this, I would say they could give the extra bit to me if they liked
It was however no joke for the person concerned with managing one line, representing a policy initiative dear to his minister’s heart. The published reports could easily make it look as if his £25million budget was heading for an over/underspend of 20% - and this in the days of strict zero cash limits
I sometimes wonder if, in these trillion dollar days, rounding errors in the computer models might not have had some role to play in bringing us to this crunch
