Related papers: Spreadsheet Risk - A New Direction for HMRC?
This paper maintains that archiving has been overlooked as a key spreadsheet internal control. The case of failed Jamaican commercial banks demonstrates how poor archiving can lead to weaknesses in spreadsheet control that contribute to…
Previous research on spreadsheet risks has predominantly focussed on errors inadvertently introduced by spreadsheet writers i.e. it focussed on the end-user aspects of spreadsheet development. When analyzing a faulty spreadsheet, one might…
The use of spreadsheets is widespread. Be it in business, finance, engineering or other areas, spreadsheets are created for their flexibility and ease to quickly model a problem. Very often they evolve from simple prototypes to…
Spreadsheet audit and review procedures are an essential part of almost all City of London financial transactions. Structured processes are used to discover errors in large financial spreadsheets underpinning major transactions of all…
Spreadsheet users regularly deal with uncertainty in their data, for example due to errors and estimates. While an insight into data uncertainty can help in making better informed decisions, prior research suggests that people often use…
Spreadsheets are powerful tools which play a business-critical role in many organizations. However, many bad decisions taken due to faulty spreadsheets show that these tools need serious quality assurance. Furthermore, while collaboration…
Microsoft Excel is the most ubiquitous analytical tool ever built. Companies around the world leverage it for its power, flexibility and ease of use. However, spreadsheets are manually intensive and prone to error, making it difficult for…
A business case study on how three simple guidelines: 1. Make it easy to check (and maintain) 2. Make it safe to use 3. Keep business logic out of code changed user attitudes and improved spreadsheet quality in a financial services…
Over the last century, risk scores have been the most popular form of predictive model used in healthcare and criminal justice. Risk scores are sparse linear models with integer coefficients; often these models can be memorized or placed on…
Contemporary spreadsheets are plagued by a profusion of errors, auditing difficulties, lack of uniform development methodologies, and barriers to easy comprehension of the underlying business models they represent. This paper presents a…
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats due to limited resources and cybersecurity expertise, in addition to an increasingly hostile cyber threat environment at national and international levels.…
At face value, this essay is about understanding a fairly esoteric governance tool called compute thresholds. However, in order to grapple with whether these thresholds will achieve anything, we must first understand how they came to be. To…
Research capacity is critical in understanding systemic risk and informing new regulation. Banking regulation has not kept pace with all the complexities of financial innovation. The academic literature on systemic risk is rapidly…
This paper demonstrates a methodology to help practitioners maximise the utility of complex multidisciplinary engineering models implemented as spreadsheets, an area presenting unique challenges. As motivation we investigate the expanding…
Few major commercial or economic decisions are made today which are not underpinned by analysis using spreadsheets. It is virtually impossible to avoid making mistakes during their drafting and some of these errors remain, unseen and…
Since the inception of VisiCalc over four decades ago, spreadsheets have undergone a gradual transformation, evolving from simple ledger automation tools to the current state of Excel, which can be described as an Integrated Development…
This management paper looks at the real world issues faced by practitioners managing spreadsheets through the production phase of their life cycle. It draws on the commercial experience of several developers working with large corporations,…
A common application of spreadsheets is the development of models that deliver projections of the future financial statements of companies established to pursue ventures that are subject to project financing. A survey of 11 such…
This paper discusses the risks and potential impacts of spreadsheet errors in scientific research data in a Neuroscience research centre in the UK. Spreadsheets usage in neuroscience, or indeed any medical discipline, is a largely…
Research on spreadsheet errors began over fifteen years ago. During that time, there has been ample evidence demonstrating that spreadsheet errors are common and nontrivial. Quite simply, spreadsheet error rates are comparable to error…