There are very many reports of spreadsheet related errors, so many in fact, that we stopped collating them due to the effort involved a few years ago.  We have recently reviewed the horror stories to  condense them down to just a few, so that readers are not overwhelmed by a mass of essentially similar reports with out of date web links. The criteria we have used to narrow the list down are:

The stories are of permanent and significant interest, the original or related News sites are still available on the internet, suggesting that the horror story is or used to be well known, and had a big impact, they are not confined to just the financial sector, but also include public sector, government and schools etc, and they are quite often cited on the other web sites.  These stories illustrate common problems that occur with the uncontrolled use of spreadsheets. In most cases, we identify the area of risk involved and then say how we think the problem might have been avoided.

When I read about the €7 billion loss at Société Générale (SG) I thought, "This can't be happening AGAIN!" But, apparently, it can and it has. One of the many speculations about what triggered the SG debacle is spreadsheet fraud. Even organizations with great internal controls often overlook controls when it comes to spreadsheets. It's just something no one really thinks about, except a few wily employees bent on deceit.

French banking giant Societe Generale issued a report Friday into how a rogue trader carried out more than $7 billion in fraud and ways the bank is bolstering security and internal control procedures to prevent future problems.

This article pertains to the UK's "west coast rail franchising fiasco", a crisis "that saw the west coast service run by Virgin handed to FirstGroup before the competition was scrapped, leaving the future of Britain's railways in chaos.  It discusses the roles that several different individuals played in this situation that was caused in part by a spreadsheet on which all calculations were modelled was fundamentally flawed.  The key cause of the flaw was in the "GDP Resilience Model", which mixed up real and inflated financial figures and contained elements of double counting.

This article discusses the need for Britain's second largest drug maker, AstraZeneca, being forced to reiterate its 2011 and mid-term financial forecasts after inadvertently releasing confidential company information to analysts.

Despite all of the sophisticated tools at their disposal, CFOs and other finance executives still rely on spreadsheets when it matters - at financial-reporting time.  More than 70% of the 1,100 global executives interviewed in a survey by Oracle and Accenture said they used spreadsheets to track and manage financial reporting on a daily basis.

The South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is notifying 228,435 Medicaid beneficiaries following a major breach of protected health information.

The personal information of more than 1,000 public employees of Wayne County, Mich., was exposed when a spreadsheet containing their data was inadvertently attached to an email blast.

NASA's fiscal year 1999 Statement of Budgetary Resources (SBR) was misstated by a reported $644 million due, in part, to a misinterpretation of guidance and errors in NASA's ad hoc process for generating budgetary information. As a result, the NASA locations used various methods to extract the data for this line item from their separate systems and entered the data on spreadsheets, which were then compiled by NASA headquarters. “... NASA officials have indicated that undetected errors in this spreadsheet process - in addition to the inclusion of the erroneous category of transactions - were also responsible for a portion of the SBR misstatement. 

 According to NASA officials, they have strengthened internal controls over this process for fiscal year 2000.  Arthur Andersen did not detect the error in NASA's SBR during its audit of the fiscal year 1999 financial statements. Evidence in Arthur Andersen's working papers relating to understanding and testing internal controls and validating underlying data for key financial statement balances was not adequate to support Arthur Andersen's unqualified audit opinion, on the SBR and Statement of Financing for fiscal year 1999. ...The other errors of approximately $32 million related to errors in the spreadsheet data may have had an impact on the P&F Schedules.”

The law firm representing Barclays filed the motion (download PDF) on Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking to exclude 179 Lehman contracts that it said were mistakenly included in the asset purchase agreement. The firm — Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP — said in the motion that one of its first-year law associates had unknowingly added the contracts when reformatting a spreadsheet in Excel. At the time when the error occurred, Cleary Gottlieb was wo