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Comment by badcppdev | Hacker News Reader

That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!

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Read up on the UK Post Office Horizon scandal if you want a really horrible example of this.

Yeah, I immediately thought of this story as a kind of reverse version of that.

Instead of buggy code causing innocent people to become criminals, here a “computer glitch” was blamed to explain away a signs of criminal behavior.

Discrepancies in accounting are the norm, not the exception. No large company will ever have perfectly balanced books for a multitude of reasons - too many different IT systems that sometimes but not always have the same data, humans in the loop that forget or fat-finger entries, inventory loss/theft/damage, you name it.

You're right in principle, but are they usually 20%?

No chance! (should be the correct answer).

This is only 20% of cash fares paid at LRT stations. It wouldn’t count those who used a bus pass, paper ticket (these are sold at many retailers, not just directly by Edmonton Transit), or those who paid on a bus and are using their transfer to ride the LRT.

Having your books off by a few percent is indeed quite common. However, missing 20% on your primary source of income is not the norm. If a company would report that nowadays, it would trigger a money laundering investigation.

I'll bet they baselined 20% and started comparing it to the previous month or previous year. After many years, they probably established norms that accounted for this 20% loss unknowingly.

Was the cash box here the primary source of income??

Probably not: their (1?) LRT line was just 1 chunk of their transit system, and systems generally have a weekly/monthly/student pass to uhhh, reward their heaviest users.

And govt funding is probably a major chunk of the income as well (if it can be considered income and not just part of budget)

This was decades ago, the ticket machines were not real-time connected to anything. It's entirely possible the numbers accounting used for ticket sales was the amount of cash retrieved from the machines, and there was no separate system keeping track of the tickets printed.

Good point. 1981 was a very long time ago in IT terms

They likely counted the number of passengers via turnstiles or a gate or something. Think passenger count would be a good indicator of expected revenue and there would be a pretty clear gap. Probably one of the things the auditors noticed that was explained away by buggy code.

Unfortunately in Edmonton, the LRT is largely on the honour system. There are no fare gates, turnstiles, etc, to derive an accurate count from. Any passenger counts presumably come from statistical sampling or from checking fares as they exit the system (this is an occasional enforcement activity, not an everyday occurrence).

There is a pilot project[0] to put turnstiles/gates at two stations, but this is to keep the homeless out of the stations, not to count passengers.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/transit-turnstiles-o...

Wouldn't they be able to measure the rolls of ticket paper?

And mechancial counters were a thing in 1981 as well. I mean the machines had a way to say "you need to pay X amount" or a way to count money, surely that can be fed into a daily / weekly counter, a printed record, etc.

And also, they were pretty precise with the amount that he stole: they can't bring a guess to court, they had an exact record of how much was stolen.

If they trend it, auditors should still notice it, but different tickets cost different amounts, so there will be variability.

E.g. Kids and seniors get discounts.

Disgraceful? What if they didn't have adequate ridership numbers to use to reconcile? A lot of bus cash fares don't keep a rider number. And it was 1981.

They did; the article even points out that there were two audits that showed the discrepancies:

> The failure to catch him, despite discrepancies between fares and cash raised in two audits, was put down to a belief that the errors were software glitches and, after his arrest, led to a significant amount of internal finger-pointing.

Wanna bet a few more people were doing this a bit higher up the coin stream.

Complicit would be another word to consider.

When you get an asshole boss, people stop defecting when they see others getting away with stuff.

I'm not sure I could ignore outright theft. But I've definitely ignored - and watched others ignore - sandbagging, particularly when it has followed burnout.

It’s not their money so “meh?”. Actually calling it out probably meant more work for them.

They should have incentivized them with an annual bonus for reconciliation. Obviously keep the ticket and cash people separate (so they don’t just game it to get a bonus).

Spread out that's still $150k a year. Someone should have noticed >12k a month disappearing.

Just say it's a glitch but never write a fix ticket and it will hang.

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