The $500M Dollar Typo

In a company a worked for many years ago I was in charge of delivering a weekly report to the board with What went wrong this week, Why it went wrong, How we fixed it, How we are making sure that it doesn't break again.

I'd really like to know which checks the USPS added to prevent for something else to cost them $500 M again. OK, there is the usual read the report check which worked on Saturday that time, but it didn't happened on time. So, maybe no automation of actually doing the payment at midnight on Friday?

miki123211 · 2 years ago

People who live paycheck-to-paycheck not getting paid at all is potentially a much bigger issue, particularly when you have laws and unions involved. The conditions for that issue are also far less stringent, you don't need an extremely unusual operator error and an unplanned federal holiday happening at the same time, all you need is a single person forgetting to click "approve".

ibcj · 2 years ago

This seems like the most obvious fix. Create the Payroll Job in the "WAITING FOR APPROVAL" state instead of the "APPROVED" state.

Perhaps the OG JCL cutely encoded the job state into a single bit and no one has dared touch it since the Ford Administration.

Begs a loosely related question: what VCS do you suspect the JCL is stored in? I'm going with the "incremental .BAK system", if any.

plorg · 2 years ago

This is interesting, but the telling is fairly vague. It cites a congressional report, which would be interesting to read, but there's no reference that helps me track down such a report.

poundofshrimp · 2 years ago

This is curious but saying that “single typo cost the USPS 500 million dollars” is misleading since they got it all back in the end.

Graziano_M · 2 years ago

The redundant "Dollar" here bothers me more than it should. I can't help but read it as "The 500 million dollar dollar typo"

etc-hosts · 2 years ago

The post writer is a former journalist who should probably know better.

pmontra · 2 years ago

Redoubts · 2 years ago

> If a federal employee is accidentally overpaid, the government can only recoup 16.67% of the amount of the overpayment per paycheck pay period.

Very curious to hear the story of that rule

appplication · 2 years ago

I can wager a guess. In the military, it was pretty common for finance to mess something up, especially around TDYs and moves between assignments. You might get overpaid by a few $k and only 6 months or a year later would someone notice. Of course that is a lot of money to most people, especially military folks who might make $30-50k/year and wouldn’t immediately have a few $k to give back or subsist on if a paycheck was docked.

znkynz · 2 years ago

TL;DR - it probably cost the Post Office several houndred thousand dollars in internal time to fix this, rather than $500M.

dharmab · 2 years ago

They did have to borrow A good chunk of that $500M from the US Treasury for several months, though.

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llimos · 2 years ago

If Cockroach Labs think it remarkable that someone wouldn't be fired for a single typo, what does that say about working there?