Ever turned your IT skills into weapons for crimefighting?
Quite often I've been asked to write financial applications where some kind of solid baseline is needed to anchor the figures in order to cover my backside. An example was a client who had bought an American* accounting system. They often complained that it had no bank reconciliation feature, so I volunteered to write one. I searched in vain for an audit trail within the package to base my calculations on, but there was no such thing, so I had to generate one from scratch every time and compare with the previous one prior to any reconcilation that was needed. Any disparity and my utility would refuse to run. After this system had been up and working for a while they came up with the dreaded data inconsiustency message. Turned out that they had deleted tranactions in the accounts package, and my software had detected this. No criminal intent here, I must emphasise, but I had to amend my software to roll back, report telling the operator that a transaction that impacted a reconciled transaction had occurred, and that everything subsequent to that transaction had to be re-reconciled.
Which took me back to the client's original request for a reconciliation facility. "So THAT explains why sometimes the totals that did match up no longer don't." Basically anyone in the organisation could delete a transaction, and there was no record of it anywhere.
* I doubt whether this could be marketed in the UK with this kind of vulnerability to undetectable deletion. Surprised the IRS allows it though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
