Spreadsheet Horror Stories

It's possible, although rare, for a documentation mistake to cost a company a material (in the accounting sense) amount of money or to make it the target of a lawsuit. Not so with spreadsheets, and errors in a spreadsheet can be harder to find than those in a document.

The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group has compiled a list of spreadsheet horror stories. Some of them are pretty chilling. Here's just one example, which cost a company £185,000 because a spreadsheet posted online contained personal information:

The Information Commissioner has imposed a penalty of £185,000 on Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS trust, who posted spreadsheets summarising their equal opportunities performance on-line. The WHOLE of each spreadsheet was posted, including the pivot tables containing sensitive personal information about every employee. These were on line for 10 months before anyone noticed, despite the Commissioner penalising two other trusts for similar disclosures, and blogging to highlight the risks. No checks were made before uploading, “nobody knew that Excel could do things like that.”

This one cost shareholders in Tibco Software $100 million.

Tibco Software shareholders will be getting $100 million less than originally anticipated from the company’s more than $4 billion sale to Vista Equity Partners as a result of a spreadsheet error that overstated Tibco’s equity value.According to a regulatory filing, Goldman Sachs, which is advising Tibco on the deal, used the spreadsheet in calculating that Tibco’s implied equity value was about $4.2 billion. The merger agreement, reflecting that number, was announced Sept. 29.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a parallel documentation risks interest group.