Category Archives: Australian IQ Trainwrecks

An Airtravel trainwreck near-miss

From today’s Irish Independent comes a story which clearly shows the impact that poor quality information can have on a process or an outcome. The tale serves to highlight the fact that information entered as part of a process can feed into other processes and result in a less than desirable outcome.

On 20th March 2009, poor quality information nearly resulted in the worst air traffic disaster in Australian history as an Airbus A340-500 narrowly avoided crashing on take off into a residential area of Melbourne. The aircraft sustained damage to its tail and also caused damage to various lights and other systems on the runway of the airport at Melbourne.

The provisional report of the Australian Air Crash investigation found that the root cause for the incident was the inputting of an incorrect calculation for the weight of the aircraft of 262 tonnes, where as the plane was actually 362 tonnes in weight. This affected the calculations for airspeed required for take-off and the necessary thrust required to reach that speed.

The end  result was that the plane failed to take off correctly and gain height as required, resulting in the tail of the plane impacting on the runway and then proceeding to plough through a lighting array and airport instruments at the end of the runway.

It is interesting, from an Information Quality perspective, to read the areas that the Accident Investigation team are looking at for further investigation (I’ve put the ones of most interest in Bold text, and the full report is available here):

  • human performance and organisational risk controls, including:
    • data entry
    • a review of similar accidents and incidents
    • organisational risk controls
    • systems and processes relating to performance calculations
  • computer-based flight performance planning, including:
    • the effectiveness of the human interface of computer based planning tools.
  • reduced power takeoffs, including:
    • the risks associated with reduced power takeoffs and how they are  managed
    • crew ability to reconcile aircraft performance with required takeoff performance, and the associated decision making of the flight crew
    • preventative methods, especially technological advancements.

The Report by the Australian authorities also contains reference to some of the migitations that the aircraft operator was considering to help prevent a recurrence of this risk:

  • • human factors – including review of current pre-departure, runway performance calculation and cross-check procedures; to determine if additional enhancement is feasible and desirable, with particular regard to error tolerance and human factors issues.
  • training – including review of the initial and recurrent training in relation to mixed fleet flying and human factors.
  • fleet technical and procedures – including introduction of a performance calculation and verification system which will protect against single data source entry error by allowing at least two independent calculations.
  • hardware and software technology – including liaising with technology providers regarding systems for detecting abnormal take-off performance.

For those of us familiar with Information Quality practices, this is an impressive haul of information quality management improvement actions focussed on ensuring that this type of near-miss never happens again. It is doubly interesting that causes of poor quality information feature in the items that are subject to further investigation (e.g. “human factors”, risk controls etc.) and common approaches to resolution or prevention of information quality problems form 75% of the action plan put forward by the operator (process enhancement, improved checking of accuracy/validity, assuring consistency with other facts or measures etc).

Antipodean Bankers Sheepish over Overdraft Bungle (Again)

New Zealand Couple do bunk with bungled overdraft funds

Courtesy of  @Firstlink and @DataQualityPro on Twitter, and hot of the presses at BBC News comes this case of an IQTrainwreck in New Zealand.

Police are hunting for a pair of nefarious desperadoes who took advantage of a poor unsuspecting bank which deposited NZ$10 Million in their account instead of the NZ$10,000 that they had requested. That’s a difference of three zeroes, but in the wrong place.

The couple, it seems, have withdrawn an undisclosed amount of the money and appear to have left the country. They are being pursued by the authorities through Interpol, and it seems the Australian bank that gave them the money by accident are eager to have it back:

Westpac media relations manager Craig Dowling said the bank was “pursuing vigorous criminal and civil action to recover a sum of money stolen”.

Now, this is not the first time that something like this has happened in the Antipodes, and the last time it was WestPac who were over-generous with their credit.

Oops we did it again before

Back in September 2007 we carried the story of New South Wales business man Victor Ollis who, as a result of an undetected (by WestPac) error had benefited to the tune of AUD$11 Million. The quote below is from the original story on Australia’s news.com.au

Mr Ollis had an automatic transfer facility with the bank, which topped up his business account using funds from his personal account.

The transfers should have been stopped after his personal account was overdrawn in February 2004, the court heard yesterday.

But due to an error at Westpac, his account continued to be replenished – only with money “from the bank’s own pocket”.

Between June and December 2005, Westpac honoured cheques totalling about $11 million written by Mr Ollis.

WestPac sued Mr Ollis and were awarded their money back plus interest.  However, as Mr Ollis was apparently terminally ill at the time, there is a chance that they never got their money back.

A proud tradition in banking

However, WestPac are not alone in the pantheon of banking information quality trainwrecks. (We won’t talk about the current Global Financial Crisis and how some of its roots can be traced back to poor quality information… not yet anyway).

My personal favourite from our archive of Banking Information Quality Trainwrecks has to be this one though…

  • From Australia in  December 2007 – “Cat Gets Credit Card“. In this case it wasn’t WestPac but the Bank of Queensland who goofed.

But we’re only scratching the surface

Here at IQTrainwrecks.com we know we are only scratching the surface of these issues. Please contact us with your examples of Information Quality Trainwrecks (particulary in banking) so we can add them to the Roll of Honour.

A Cat-astrophe

December is the month when the “wacky news” stories from around the world get an airing…

 I found this one via Yahoo this morning… Cat gets credit card.

An Australian woman decided to test the indentity screening processes that her bank uses for credit card applications. So she applied for a card in the name of her cat, who is 2 years old.

The bank asked for ID documents, but hadn’t received them before they issued the card (the cat was getting preened for the passport photographs – we can only assume). Furthermore the cat’s owner wasn’t notified that a second card had been issued on her account.

AUS$4,200 of a credit limit is available to the cat.

IQ Trainwreck in Australian bank gives man a AU$11m overdraft

The Register picked up on this story on Friday. Their headline describes it as a ‘scam’, but one of their commenters correctly points out that this is probably a failure of a business rule in one of the bank’s processes which resulted in Mr Victor Ollis running up an overdraft of AUS$11 million (approx US$9 million).

According to Australian news site News.com.au,

Mr Ollis had an automatic transfer facility with the bank, which topped up his business account using funds from his personal account.

The transfers should have been stopped after his personal account was overdrawn in February 2004, the court heard yesterday.

But due to an error at Westpac, his account continued to be replenished – only with money “from the bank’s own pocket”.

Between June and December 2005, Westpac honoured cheques totalling about $11 million written by Mr Ollis.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that

Over the next seven months the NSW businessman siphoned close to $11 million in Westpac’s own funds into his own affairs, taking advantage of a recurring technical error that topped up his business account.

(emphasis added by the IQ Trainwrecks team).

The bank’s own legal representative is quoted by news.com.au as  saying

“A human error meant the facility kept working, except it was drawing money from the bank’s own pocket”.

The Australian Courts have found against Mr Ollis and his partner and he has been ordered to repay WestPac AU$14,692,968.03, the original AU$11m plus interest, but that may not be the end of it as there is still to be a hearing on court costs for the case.

Of course, as Mr Ollis has pointed out, he doesn’t have long to live and the Bank may not get anything.

So, what happened here?

Money was being transferred from Account A to Account B. Account A became overdrawn. The money transfer kept running. The expectation that Mr Ollis had that the transfers would not run if he had no money in the account was not met. Unfortunately Mr Ollis formed the expectation that he could keep spending the money that was being transferred into his account as it was the Bank’s error.

Who loses here?

Everyone. The bank has the bad publicity of a court case arising out of a series of internal errors. Mr Ollis and his partner face significant bills at the end of this to repay the money. Should some or all of the money go unpaid, the Bank’s customers and shareholders will bear the brunt of lower profits and/or higher bank charges as a result.

Given the amount of money involved, the likely simplicity of the root cause and the significant impacts on Mr Ollis, the bank, its shareholders and its customers, this is a definite candidate for an IQ Trainwreck.

Oh, and before we forget, this is a case of a customer who decided he didn’t want to pay the money back and tried to fight the situation. If the source of the error was a systems failure or even ‘human error’ there is a good chance that other customers might have been affected, albeit in a much smaller (and quieter) way.