Techcrunch, via The Register, tells us of an information quality error by a small software company based in Redmond, Washington called Microsoft. You may have heard of them.

It would seem that Microsoft has written to some of the former employees it recently made redundant to inform them that they’ve had too much money paid to them in their severance lump sum and demanding the money back.

Commenters over on The Register have  speculated as to the root cause, with a calculation error in Excel being flagged as the likely culprit. In  their letter, Microsoft blame the whole kerfuffle on “an administrative error”.  What’s that software that administrators use to make calculations on rows and columns of data on a computer?

One former Microsoft-ie quoted in TechCrunch said:

Right away I was angry because when I got my severance check, I immediately created a budget to stretch this out as long as possible. I know we’re in a recession now and I don’t know how long I’ll be unemployed. And now here comes this letter totally destroying the budget and on top of that, there’s no detailed information on how the error occurred, no details breaking down the severance pay

So, poor quality information leading to financial and personal impacts on people… yup, this meets the criteria for a IQ Trainwreck.

Being an even handed and fair minded company, Microsoft has also underpaid some other ex-employees, who also got letters it seems.

That said, Microsoft have bitten the bullet on this issue and are eating the cost of non-quality information by lettng the overpaid staff keep the overpayments. The fact that the story was picked up by hundreds of news outlets was obviously not a consideration in that decision.

So the total cost to Microsoft of this information quality trainwreck is

(Cost of overpayment) + (cost of producing & sending letters) + (PR cost of sending letters)

The cost of the  overpayment alone is given as $125,000, according to the UK’s Guardian newspaper today.