Computer Audit Update April 1995

Howard Nicholson has over six years experience as an Information Systems Auditor within the Audit Branch of the Australian Department of Social Security. During this time

he has been responsible for taking audits of the department’s online systems and applications; datacentre reviews; audits of the systems

development life cycle; and logical security reviews. The views expressed in this paper,

which was first presented at EDPAC ‘94, are entirely those of the author and do not reflect any offical position of the Australian Department of Security.

NEWS

German railway computerized payroll repeatedly fails

The recently privatized German Railway System (Deutsche Bahn) has been reported to have been unable for several months to prepare an correct employee payroll. The arrangement under which the System’s workers had been transferred from the German Civil Service had provided that the individual’s actual wages would remain essentially unchanged. Calculation of their Civil Service payments, reportedly, was complex, involving elaborate adjustments and credits. These were transferred to the new

Railway System payroll program.

Unfortunately, both the database and the new program that used it were riddled with errors. These faults allegedly remained uncorrected for several monthly payroll periods. As a result of this, some employees were not paid at all. Others received only a small fraction of the amount that they were due. Still other workers - mostly apprentices, as it turned out - were paid 10 or 15 times the amount that they should have been paid. Overpayments, reportedly, were corrected promptly by Railway System officials. Underpayments, however, were not corrected anywhere nearly as quickly. One of the reasons that the problem persisted, it was alleged, is because the payroll was too large and complex to prepare in a manual fashion. Finally Railway System workers were asked to keep personal

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records of the amounts that they actually received and the sums that they were due for each of the pay periods in question.

Be/den Menkus

Flaw in tax-preparation program

could lead to many unhappy returns

The MaclnTax Personal 1040 program, used by thousands of Macintosh users to manage tax details, has been found to contain an error according to Democrat & Chronic/e, NY. The flaw occurs when the program is used in conjunction with Quicken, Intuit’s popular home accounting software, which leads to the omission of every 30th entry made into the tax program. The bug has since been fixed by intuit who have also announced that all registered users can get a free updated version of the software as well as payment for any penalties resulting from the error.

Glitch leads to $350 000 bank theft

Thieves ran off with nearly $350 000 in the

space of a weekend from 48 automatic teller

machines in Oregon, USA recently reports

Buffalo News, NY. Apparently, the thieves made

over 700 withdrawals in several cities from the

Oregon Telco Credit Union in Northwest Oregon

using only one credit card which had been stolen

form a parked car. An error in the credit union’s

new computer system allowed the thieves to

withdraw unlimited amounts of cash out of each

ATM, which they then covered up by making

bogus deposits totalling nearly $1 million. A

special agent of the Secret Service in Portland,

USA said that three people had been arrested and a fourth was being searched in connection with the November thefts from Oregon Telco

Credit Union.

Unpublicized US centre city flood disrupts computing

The collapse of a century-old underground cast iron water utility main pipe adjacent to its

01995 Elsevier Science Ltd