Blog: Pete Loshin

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The Four Hundred Million Dollar Mistake

Someone clearly messed up big time: Indiana House Wrongly Valued at $400 Million. Somehow, someone--they're blaming an "outside user", apparently--got into the system and changed the assessed value of a $121,900 house to $400,000,000.

This year's tax bill for the homeowner, usually around $1,500, came in at $8 million.

What would have been a harmless error could cause serious disruption, including layoffs, for the tax districts which were counting on that $8 million for their budgets.

So, who's going to get blamed for this one? Some possibilities:

• "Someone" from outside who got into the system and made the change. That's who the county IT director is betting on.
• The IT director also is pointing her finger at the county auditor's office, which she said was notified about the error and told how to fix it.
• The treasurer's office, which noticed the billing error and tried to fix it, but that wasn't enough.
• The IT director's predecessor(s), for having failed to remove the program under suspicion and/or for implementing a program that didn't properly implement security checking.
• The IT director, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's tempting to blame a lack of sanity checking in the original code, but implementing it in a system that might be dealing with residential as well as commercial and industrial properties could be a problem: large factories could easily be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and generate multi-million dollar tax bills.

More likely, the fault is in overburdened and understaffed IT departments that have to deploy new systems as well as support (and eventually remove) old systems that they may not even be aware exist.

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