PraxIS Feb. 2008

08-02 Contents: Société Générale, Direct Debit Fraud, Spreadsheet safety

ISSN 1649-2374 This issue online at http://www.sysmod.com/praxis/prax0802.htm   [Previous] [Index]  [Next]

Systems Modelling Ltd.: Managing reality in Information Systems - strategies for success

 

IN THIS ISSUE

1) Risk & Security
    Societe Generale

2) Bank Direct Debit fraud
    Jeremy Clarkson's challenge taken up

3) Spreadsheets
    New certification on safe spreadsheeting being tested

4) Off Topic
    Schadenfreude

15 Web links in this newsletter
 

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Welcome to PraxIS

A single story this month, but what a story!

Patrick O'Beirne

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1)  Risk & Security

Société Générale loses annual profit

2008 started so well for SocGen, winning the Risk Magazine Awards 2008 for Equity Derivatives House of the Year

http://www.risk.co.uk/public/showPage.html?page=685494

Then on January 24 it emerged that SocGen suffered the biggest rogue trading scandal in history, for which 31-year-old junior trader Jerome Kerviel has been charged. When the bank discovered  hidden trades on Jan. 19 and 20, it decided to close the positions in the market quickly. But this coincided with a market rout, and the bank ended up nursing losses of 4.9 billion euros -- close to its net 2006 profit.

The Register and Wilmott.com are the usual sources for IT people to talk about these stories. Those who don't work in IT are probably better off not reading this; as the old saw goes "anyone who appreciates the law or sausage should never watch either being made" (Mark Twain? Otto von Bismark?)


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/31/kerviel/
How to lose $7.2bn with just a few Basic skillsSocGen: it could've happened anywhere - and still might
Dominic Connor wrote: "he was supposed to be an arbitrageur, someone who makes riskless profits by spotting things that have been given the wrong price. Instead he bet on prices going up and down. London firms have a rule that one is supposed to take a block of at least two weeks every year, but it's hardly enforced, and of course US workers hardly get any annual leave at all. His VBA skills would have helped him a lot to keep the illusion alive. ... most banks do not have [Excel jockeys] so you have untrained people helping each other. Knowing Excel, he would have been asked to sort out his colleagues' spreadsheets, and left sitting at their PCs able to execute any number of misdeeds while his colleague went off for lunch."

In the comments, 'Anonmyous Coward'  writes:
"Poor controls, tick in the box auditing, password sharing as standard, billions of dollars managed from excel, middle managers with all the nous of piece of  blutac, it's all true. I tell to people that if you knew what I knew you'd keep your money in a sock under your mattress. I almost mean it."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/socgen_hack/comments/
"I worked for a bank last year... Anyway, I was given root access to their systems, and they didn't even interview me before I started. ... The bank I work for have swallowed the draconian password policy hook, line and sinker meaning that their employees cannot possibly hope to mentally stay on top of the thirty or so constantly changing alphanumeric passwords they need to remember. Consequently, most people have a cheat cheet of passwords which are stored in a variety of places - from scraps of paper in unlocked desk drawers, to the password protected spreadsheet of them which I have on my computer desktop (excel spreadsheet passwords ain't exactly hard to break.) "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7218380.stm
The BBC's business editor Robert Peston says "Bankers have confirmed that at the end of last year, Jerome Kerviel had generated a colossal hidden profit for the bank of 1.4bn euros .. Among the great mysteries of the Kerviel affair is how the French bank could have failed to notice a profit of that size."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/graphics/2008/01/24/bcnjerome125big.gif
When Kerviel's CV was published, it attracted some disdainful comments from experts with double PhDs in complex mathematics. It only claimed basic VBA skills.
"Skills: Microsoft Office Packge - Visual Basic
Development of management  tools (Excel VBA Macros)
Excel macro development for the Exotic Desk"

http://www.sp.socgen.com/sdp/sdp.nsf/V3ID/D22EA4F2E1FB3487C12573DD005BC223/$file/08005gb.pdf
The SocGen report on the fraud and the sequence of events after its discovery.

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10608901&subjectID=348885&fsrc=nwl
The Economist comments rather acidly on the management's way of handling previous alarms: "SocGen has plenty of internal cops at its high-security headquarters in the La Défense enclave of Paris. The bank's annual report for 2006 devotes 26 reassuring pages to its risk-management practices; more than 2,000 staff worked in the function that year, and lots more bodies were added in 2007. Yet none of them stopped Jérôme Kerviel, the trader accused of taking enormous unauthorised bets, from building an unhedged €50 billion exposure to European futures markets (Mr Kerviel reportedly alleges that his supervisors were aware of his activities). “When challenged, he was clever enough to say, for example, that he had made a mistake,” says Jean-Pierre Mustier, the head of SocGen's investment-banking  arm. Clever, indeed. "

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080204/bs_afp/francebankingcompanysocietegeneralecrimereport
"Certain internal control mechanisms at Societe Generale did not work and those that did were not always followed up with the appropriate changes," Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said. Lagarde was speaking after delivering a report on the debacle to Prime Minister Francois Fillon, in which she said the maximum fine for breach of banking rules, currently five million euros (7.4 million dollars), should be "substantially increased".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trading_losses   WikiPedia'a catalogue of losses

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2) Bank Direct Debit fraud

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/jan/07/personalfinancenews.scamsandfraud

Jeremy Clarkson, a particularly outspoken UK TV car show presenter, wrote in a Sunday Times column last year about the HMRC loss of CDs with the personal details of 7 million families: "I have never known such a palaver about nothing. The fact is we happily hand over cheques to all sorts of unsavoury people all day long without a moment's thought. We have nothing to fear." He then printed his bank details to try and make the point that his money would be safe and that the spectre of identity theft was a sham. On Jan 6, he told readers he had opened his bank statement to find a direct debit had been set up in his name to the British Diabetic Association and £500 taken out of his account. 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/07/clarkson_bank_prank_backfires/comments/

According to other coverage, this is because the direct debit system transfers the responsibility for checking to the organisation submitting the direct debit, and guarantees that bank clients will be refunded if they claim they were wrongly charged.

The fact is, the information he gave out is on every cheque we sign, and if the shop asks us to write our home address and phone number on the back, we'll do that too. The point is, who has access to the information.

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3) Spreadsheets

Just to close the link with the main topic this month , Denis Howlett comments
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=292  "On SocGen and spreadsheets: the similarities" 

and John Stokdyk also picked up on it in AccountingWeb:

http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=179069 "Were spreadsheets a vehicle for the Societe Generale fraud?"


Safe Spreadsheeting

Last month, I delivered the first of a new course on spreadsheet safe practices with a certification scheme. This is being given a final shake down now, so we are looking for large companies with serious aims on spreadsheet controls to take part in the final tests of the assessment methods. Contact me, if your organisation is in Ireland or the UK and you feel the need to demonstrate to external auditors or regulators that you're taking a hard-nosed results-based approach to staff awareness training.

 

Spreadsheet Check and Control: 47 key skills to find and fix errors

http://www.sysmod.com/az.php?a=190540400X&b=Spreadsheet+Check+Control Available worldwide from Amazon.

http://sysmod.buy.ie/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=188  Our offer - free shipping to EU .

 

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Thank you! Patrick O'Beirne, Editor

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4) Off Topic

Schadenfreude

http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=3&threadid=58232   reports this link:

http://crookery.blogspot.com/2008/01/astonishing-soc-gen-transcripts-emerge.html 

Several Kerviel-dedicated websites have popped up, including www.jeromekerviel.com ; jerome.kerviel.com,  and jeromekerviel.net have been cybersquatted. Several video parodies of Société Générale and Kerviel are among the most popular hits on Dalymotion.com, the French video-sharing site.

 

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