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That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!
by badcppdev 3y ago
That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!
- psychlops 3y agoComplicit would be another word to consider.
- hinkley 3y agoWhen you get an asshole boss, people stop defecting when they see others getting away with stuff. I'm not sure I could ignore outright theft. But I've definitely ignored - and watched others ignore - sandbagging, particularly when it has followed burnout.
- mschuster91 3y agoDiscrepancies in accounting are the norm, not the exception. No large company will ever have perfectly balanced books for a multitude of reasons - too many different IT systems that sometimes but not always have the same data, humans in the loop that forget or fat-finger entries, inventory loss/theft/damage, you name it.
- hyperpape 3y agoYou're right in principle, but are they usually 20%?
- LightBug1 3y agoNo chance! (should be the correct answer).
- Mister_Snuggles 3y agoThis is only 20% of cash fares paid at LRT stations. It wouldn’t count those who used a bus pass, paper ticket (these are sold at many retailers, not just directly by Edmonton Transit), or those who paid on a bus and are using their transfer to ride the LRT.
- kvdveer 3y agoHaving your books off by a few percent is indeed quite common. However, missing 20% on your primary source of income is not the norm. If a company would report that nowadays, it would trigger a money laundering investigation.
- TuringNYC 3y agoI'll bet they baselined 20% and started comparing it to the previous month or previous year. After many years, they probably established norms that accounted for this 20% loss unknowingly.
- whycome 3y agoWas the cash box here the primary source of income??
- Scoundreller 3y agoProbably not: their (1?) LRT line was just 1 chunk of their transit system, and systems generally have a weekly/monthly/student pass to uhhh, reward their heaviest users.
- whycome 3y agoAnd govt funding is probably a major chunk of the income as well (if it can be considered income and not just part of budget)
- Doctor_Fegg 3y agoRead up on the UK Post Office Horizon scandal if you want a really horrible example of this.
- function_seven 3y agoYeah, I immediately thought of this story as a kind of reverse version of that. Instead of buggy code causing innocent people to become criminals, here a “computer glitch” was blamed to explain away a signs of criminal behavior.
- nikanj 3y agoThis was decades ago, the ticket machines were not real-time connected to anything. It's entirely possible the numbers accounting used for ticket sales was the amount of cash retrieved from the machines, and there was no separate system keeping track of the tickets printed.
- badcppdev 3y agoGood point. 1981 was a very long time ago in IT terms
- cogogo 3y agoThey likely counted the number of passengers via turnstiles or a gate or something. Think passenger count would be a good indicator of expected revenue and there would be a pretty clear gap. Probably one of the things the auditors noticed that was explained away by buggy code.
- Mister_Snuggles 3y agoUnfortunately in Edmonton, the LRT is largely on the honour system. There are no fare gates, turnstiles, etc, to derive an accurate count from. Any passenger counts presumably come from statistical sampling or from checking fares as they exit the system (this is an occasional enforcement activity, not an everyday occurrence). There is a pilot project[0] to put turnstiles/gates at two stations, but this is to keep the homeless out of the stations, not to count passengers. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/transit-turnstiles-on-the-table-edmonton-to-study-gates-as-way-to-improve-safety-1.7058635 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/transit-turnstiles-o...
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoWouldn't they be able to measure the rolls of ticket paper? And mechancial counters were a thing in 1981 as well. I mean the machines had a way to say "you need to pay X amount" or a way to count money, surely that can be fed into a daily / weekly counter, a printed record, etc. And also, they were pretty precise with the amount that he stole: they can't bring a guess to court, they had an exact record of how much was stolen.
- refurb 3y agoIt’s not their money so “meh?”. Actually calling it out probably meant more work for them. They should have incentivized them with an annual bonus for reconciliation. Obviously keep the ticket and cash people separate (so they don’t just game it to get a bonus).
- mensetmanusman 3y agoJust say it's a glitch but never write a fix ticket and it will hang.
- whycome 3y agoDisgraceful? What if they didn't have adequate ridership numbers to use to reconcile? A lot of bus cash fares don't keep a rider number. And it was 1981.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThey did; the article even points out that there were two audits that showed the discrepancies: > The failure to catch him, despite discrepancies between fares and cash raised in two audits, was put down to a belief that the errors were software glitches and, after his arrest, led to a significant amount of internal finger-pointing.
- cf1241290841 3y agoWanna bet a few more people were doing this a bit higher up the coin stream.
- hinkley 3y agoSpread out that's still $150k a year. Someone should have noticed >12k a month disappearing.
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