List of spreadsheet mistakes

A 2017 study concluded that up to 90% of spreadsheets had errors that affected their results.^[1]

Below is a list of examples of spreadsheet mistakes that are caused by a variety of reasons.

Date	Organization	Description	Issue	Reference
January 1995	Fidelity Investments	A $2.6 billion miscalculation after an accountant accountant omitted the minus sign on a net capital loss of $1.3 billion	Omitted minus sign	[2]
June 2003	TransAlta	A $24 million loss from buying more US power transmission hedging contracts at higher prices	Cut and paste issue	[3]
October 2008	Barclays	Unintentionally revealing 179 contracts Lehman Brothers had intended to trade	Hidden columns	[4]
May 2012	JPMorgan Chase	A $6 billion loss when a Value-at-Risk model was miscalculated	Cut and paste issue	[5]
August 2016	N/A	Research on estimating that one-fifth of papers with supplementary material containing Excel gene lists to have erroneous gene name conversions	Automatic formatting	[6][7]
December 2021	Crypto.com	Accidental manual entry caused a $100 refund to be a $10.47 million transfer	Manual data entry	[8][9]

See also

• Model risk § Spreadsheet Errors
• Spreadsheet § Spreadsheet risk

External links

• EuSPRIG Horror Stories - European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group
• Data Organization in Spreadsheets for Ecologists