Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
March 24, 2008
Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses

Does it surprise you to learn traders would cover up losses to protect bonuses? It shouldn’t, it happens over and over. Would it surprise you that almost any bonus (or quota) scheme increases the odds that the data will be doctored to meet the goals? It shouldn’t. Intelligent measures to make such doctoring difficult can help reduce the practice. But it is a likely risk of any such goal. As we have quoted Brian Joiner as saying: there are: “3 ways to improve the figures: distort the data, distort the system and improve the system. Improving the system is the most difficult.” So it is no shock that distorting the data is often the tacit people use (especially when the rewards are great or the punishment for missing is severe).

Of course the people that take unethical or illegal action are responsible for their actions. But managers that set up poor systems and then get poor results should not be surprised. You mainly read about the exciting distortion of data - but there is much more such distortion that doesn’t seem interesting enough for the press.

Traders at top investment bank ‘covered up losses to protect their bonuses in £1.4 bn scam’

A top investment bank said yesterday that some of its traders had tried to protect their massive bonuses with a £1.4billion scam. Credit Suisse was forced to admit it will pay the price for the traders’ ruthless scheming by sinking into the red. All the traders involved - some of them based in London - have been fired or suspended.

Shares in the bank, which is based in Zurich, tumbled 7.5 per cent yesterday. Credit Suisse admitted it had discovered intentional “pricing errors” by a small number of traders involved in complex investments linked to the mortgage market.

Related: Problems with Bonuses - Be Careful What You Measure - Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations - Another Quota Failure Example

One Response to “Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses”

  1. If you can’t distort the data, just don’t look at it « Process Rants Says:

    [...] the data, just don’t look at it A sad reminder of the state of affairs comes from Curious Cat Management when it comes to conflicts of interest between the data and one’s own goals.  It is [...]

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