>Seems like they should be held accountable - I mean if you're the programmer and you've written something that is without a doubt producing false and totally made-up account statements - well no excuse for doing that - you've just became part of the fraud.

OTOH, you may just stick to the specs and not notice the trick at all. I once had to write a pricing analysis, i.e. take total value of purchases, take off the amouts sold, and compare the result with the value of the unsold at current prices. In the specs it said there should be a running total on each page. Mind you, not page total, but total so far.

The report was something to show to the board, and the items on it weren't in any particular order. Nobody really knew how many pages there should be. The total was also wildly varying, because it was one of the high inflation years, and then depending on the speed of turnover and price adjustment the amount on each item could be anything, from a 50% loss to 40% gain. But it wasn't expressed as percentage, rather it was just money.

The trick was in the absolute correctness of each digit. Except that they wouldn't show the whole report - they'd tear it at the page where they liked the total, and throw away the rest.