Accuracy

Federal officials have fined Texas $3.96 million for errors in issuing food stamp benefits, according to a letter to House Speaker Joe Straus. The penalty is for a high rate of overpayments or underpayments two years in a row, said the letter from U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Kevin Concannon. Read the related article published in the San Antonio Express-News.

I continue to be amazed at the number of errors that consistently show up in Annual Reports and financial statements of public companies. An excellent example of this was highlighted in Todd Wallack’s October 4, 2010, Boston Globe article (In reporting pay, firms can err big: Figures on executives off by up to $500,000). The article reports several examples of significant errors on reported executive compensation, from a mere twenty dollars to more than half a million dollars with several errors in […]

Being accurate with data is important not only in our professional lives, but also in our personal lives, as this recent news story clearly demonstrates. After taking the wrong medication, a woman who is six-weeks pregnant is nervously waiting to see if there will be permanent effects to her unborn child. She was erroneously given another patient’s medication at a Safeway Pharmacy in Colorado. Although Safeway appears to have taken responsibility for the error, it does not fix the possible […]