Terminally Incoherent

My boss called me today with a Quickbooks question. Of course the fact that I’m not an accountant, I do not use Quickbooks, and that I have only a vague idea of what it is used for didn’t cross his mind. After all, I’m a “computer guy” so I should be able to somehow magically figure out the inner workings of every piece of existing software in a matter of seconds, without really understanding the underlying business logic.

His question was how to find out who made certain changes to the file on a given day (they are investigating some fraudulent charges or whatever). I didn’t know so I googled it, and it turns out that Quickbooks has a feature called Audit Trail which allows you to track all the changes that were made to the file. Of course if you disable it, nothing is tracked, and the software conveniently discards are the identifiable user information when saving changes.

I figured this feature would be somewhat useless. If someone was to commit fraud, they would surely disable this feature to hide the evidence, right?

Wrong.

Apparently some people really suck at crime. The audit trail report pinpointed exactly which user cooked the books and when. So I guess this story has a happy ending after all. The dumb dude who was defrauding money is probably going to the “federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison” and I apparently do have magical powers that let me understand software at a glance.

And as all good stories, this one also has a moral: if you generally suck at dealing with technology you will probably also suck at white collar crime. It’s a fact.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 1:58 pm and is filed under technology, security, random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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