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$8M Revenue Shortfall Blamed on Bad DB Entry
SierraPete writes "Yahoo! News reports that an improper database entry, most likely caused by an external user, has created an $8 Million USD revenue shortfall for a northwestern Indiana county because a house that was supposed to be valued at $121,000 showed a value in the database at $800,000,000. There's no specific suggestion that this erroneous entry was done maliciously, but it is leading to big problems in the local governments as they try to figure out how to drop that much money out of their respective budgets. As an aside, how would you like to be in the homeowner's shoes when he opens up his mail box and finds an $8M property tax bill? I'm sure there was a trip to the emergency room or the dry cleaners involved."
"$121,000 showed a value in the database at $800,000,000"
Did anyone actually bother to rtfa, or is it just cool to make up numbers for post summaries now?
"A house erroneously valued at $400 million"
"The house had been valued at $121,900 before the glitch."
Yeah, why do people always blame the database? I get the "it's the database" accusation all the time from Duhvelopers.
A friend of mine was suffering iron toxicity because he took too many iron supplements. He went to the doc to find out what was wrong and went through a battery of tests. A week later he got the report in the mail saying that he had liver cancer. He had a week before his next appointment and started reading up on liver cancer only to find out that it's almost always fatal and it involves a long drawn out time of excruciating suffering before the ultimate demise. So for a week he lived with that knowledge until he went to the doc only to find out that it was a data entry error. It turns out that the code behind the checkbox for liver cancer defaulted to the affirmative and the data entry person had just clicked submit after they complete a separate section of the form. So what programmer bozo would default such a data entry field to yes? Was he/she not thinking or was it sadistic humor?