European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group
Annual Conference About EuSpRIG Mail List Downloads Public reports of errors
About EuSpRIG
EuSpRIG offers Risk Managers the world’s only independent, authoritative & comprehensive web based information describing the current state of the art in Spreadsheet Risk Management. We run a well-established annual conference which provides a forum for researchers, practitioners, trainers, vendors, consultants and auditors. We provide speakers and content for professional societies, associations, conferences and journals.
Ninth EuSpRIG Annual Conference 2008
Announcing the 9th EuSpRIG Annual Conference
in association with Spreadsheet Safe™
Title: In Pursuit of Spreadsheet Excellence
University of Greenwich, London UK July 10-11 2008
Further Conference information will be at http://www.uwic.ac.uk/eusprig/2008
Contact the conference organiser Pat Cleary on: Pmcleary at uwic.ac.uk (replace at with @)
Download the registration form: 29K RTF file or 53K PDF file
Research has repeatedly shown that an alarming proportion of corporate spreadsheet models are not tested to the extent necessary to support Directors' fiduciary, reporting and compliance obligations. Uncontrolled and untested spreadsheet models therefore pose significant business risks. These risks include:
- Lost revenue & profits
- Mispricing and poor decision making due to prevalent but undetected errors
- Fraud due to malicious tampering
- Difficulties in demonstrating fiduciary and regulatory compliance
These risks are ignored due to a widespread failure to inventory (keep records of), test, document, backup, archive and control the legions of spreadsheets that support critical corporate infrastructure.
To counter these risks and address the pertinent management issues, the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EuSpRIG) will be holding their 9th annual conference at the University of Greenwich, London UK on July 10-11 2008.
This conference will provide attendees with an opportunity to share experiences with a broad range of researchers, practitioners and recognised leaders in the field of spreadsheet research.
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University of Greenwich
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University of Wales Institute Cardiff
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Spreadsheet Engineering
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ISACA Northern England
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AuditNet
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Baker Tilly
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Systems Modelling Ltd.
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Committee
Committee 2008
David Ball (Treasurer) University of Wales Institute Cardiff
Gillian Brazewell (Member) CSA
Ray Butler (Previous EuSpRIG chair) Highways Agency, UK
David Chadwick (Previous EuSpRIG chair) University of Greenwich, UK
Pat Cleary (Secretary and Conference Organiser) University of Wales Institute Cardiff, UK
David Colver (Member) Operis, UK
Grenville Croll, (Chair) Spreadsheet Engineering, UK
Roland Mittermeir (2004 organiser) University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Simon Murphy (Member), Codematic Ltd
Patrick O'Beirne (Previous EuSpRIG chair) , Systems Modelling Ltd, Ireland
Jocelyn Paine (Member), Virtual Worlds Ltd, UK
Simon Thorne (Member) University of Wales Institute Cardiff, UK
David Ward, (Member) Baker Tilly, UKTo receive updates about the group's activities please send email to Patrick O'Beirne < >
Previous conferences
Background
The constitutional purpose of the group is to promote a free exchange of information on the risks inherent in the use of electronic spreadsheet programs, methods for the development and testing of business models and applications created using such programs, and tools and techniques for the audit of such business models and applications. More specifically, the objectives of the group were to provide a forum where research, into business and audit risks from the use of spreadsheets and ways in which those risks can be avoided and countered, could be collated and presented in a form suitable for auditors and business managers. EuSpRIG is a voluntary organisation managed by an elected committee with a written constitution. EuSpRIG has since July 2000 presented an annual international conference. EuSpRIG publishes selected papers from its proceedings 6 months in arrears on www.arxiv.org where they can be downloaded free of charge. EuSpRIG thanks its sponsors for their continued support.
Our web
The EuSpRIG web is an international network of related sites.
David Chadwick hosts the EuSpRIG Education Special Interest Group( ESIG) at The university of Greenwich http://csac.cms.gre.ac.uk/
The University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC) research group headed by Pat Cleary proposes to develop software agents for the reduction of risk in end-user spreadsheet use.
Publications of the Departments of Informatics, University of Klagenfurt include Papers by Markus Clermont
Further research links are at www.sysmod.com/sslinks.htm#Research
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eusprig
To join this group by email, simply send a blank email to:
eusprig-subscribe at yahoogroups dot com
and you will receive an email asking you to reply to confirm.
Downloads
Selected papers and articles for free downloading
If clicking on the link does not show you the file, your browser may have security settings that prevent viewing PDF files. The safest method is to right-click on the link and choose Save Target As from the shortcut menu. Then click Save on the resulting Save As dialog.
Spreadsheet Auditing for Free (1.56Mb pdf) by Ray Butler presentation to ISACA Northern UK Jan 2006.
Stop the Subversive Spreadsheet! (147K pdf) by Ray Butler and David Chadwick, gives the background to EuSpRIG.
Is this spreadsheet a tax evader? (51K pdf) an article by Ray Butler on UK Customs audit of VAT return spreadsheets.
The Importance and Criticality of Spreadsheets in the City of London (187K pdf) by Grenville Croll presented at EuSpRIG 2005.
Spreadsheets in Clinical Medicine - A Public Health Warning (172K PDF) G. Croll, R. Butler, Spreadsheet Engineering Ltd, UK / EuSpRIG
How do you know your spreadsheet is right? (666K pdf) More than fifty Principles, Techniques and Practice of Spreadsheet Style by Philip L. Bewig July 28, 2005. With references.
Spreadsheet Modelling Best Practice (1.4MB pdf) Kindly donated by Louise Bartlett of IBM Business Consulting Services. Written by Nick Read and Jonathan Batson when Business Dynamics were part of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), published 1999 by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).
NEWS
How costly can a spreadsheet mistake be?
Check out our archive of News stories about spreadsheet errors!
Here are two of the biggest:
$24-million spreadsheet "clerical error"
June 03, 2003 TORONTO (Reuters) - TransAlta Corp. said on Tuesday it will take a $24 million charge to earnings after a bidding snafu landed it more U.S. power transmission hedging contracts than it bargained for, at higher prices than it wanted to pay.
[...] the company's computer spreadsheet contained mismatched bids for the contracts, it said. "It was literally a cut-and-paste error in an Excel spreadsheet that we did not detect when we did our final sorting and ranking bids prior to submission," TransAlta chief executive Steve Snyder said in a conference call. "I am clearly disappointed over this event. The important thing is to learn from it, which we've done."
As New York ISO rules did not allow for a reversal of the bids, the contracts went ahead.
This story was also covered in The Register (UK), Silicon Republic (IE) and the Under Way in Ireland blog.
The role of spreadsheets in the AIB/Allfirst currency trading fraud
Ray Butler outlines how spreadsheets were used as one of the vehicles for John Rusnak's fraud and the revenue control lessons this case gives us. One error in a spreadsheet will subvert all the controls in all the systems feeding into it. An auditing tool (SpACE) would have found the external links in the key spreadsheet.
