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Programming Bug Costs Citigroup $7M After Legit Transactions Mistaken For Test Data For 15 Years (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register:A programming blunder in its reporting software has led to Citigroup being fined $7m. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that error [PDF] resulted in the financial regulator being sent incomplete "blue sheet" information for a remarkable 15 years -- from May 1999 to April 2014. The mistake was discovered by Citigroup itself when it was asked to send a large but precise chunk of trading data to the SEC in April 2014 and asked its technical support team to help identify which internal ID numbers they should run a request on. That team quickly noticed that some branches' trades were not being included in the automated system and alerted those above them. Four days later a patch was in place, but it wasn't until eight months later that the company received a formal report noting that the error had affected SEC reports going back more than a decade. The next month, January 2015, Citigroup fessed up to the SEC.The glitch resided in new alphanumeric branch codes that the bank had introduced in the mid-1990s. The program code filtered out any transactions that were given three-digit branch codes from 089 to 100 and used those prefixes for testing purposes. The report adds, "But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC."
Anyone who has worked in the finance industry on the tech side of things has probably seen eye-searing levels of problems like this. It's clusterfucks all the way down. It always surprised me that something that seems like such a natural fit for software was always, without fail, so riddled with glaring bugs that it's almost unfathomable that you are the first person to notice them. At a lot of shops, the bugs are so ingrained in the process that they can't even be fixed. Working in the finance industry certainly doesn't inspire confidence in the finance industry.
An interesting experiment would be to make down-voting cost 2 moderator points instead of 1. The idea being that it would make interesting/insightful posts "stickier" by making them harder to down-vote based on agenda. I have no idea whether it would work or not but, at the very least, it might give casual users more expanded comments to read by default.
Having said that, getting rid of moderators is pure insanity. Community moderation is part of what makes slashdot an interesting site.