The Undesirable Consequences of Flawed Financial Assumptions

We are all familiar with GIGO, “Garbage in, Garbage out”, the fundamental concept in computer science and information technology that highlights the importance of data integrity. Incorrect, incomplete, or nonsensical data as input inevitably results in equally flawed output. Said another way, the quality of the output is directly determined by the quality of the input.

The flaws are not always immediately obvious, as anyone who forgets to take the garbage out before leaving for vacation can attest. It often requires the passage of time to fully appreciate the impact of missing, incomplete, or manual interventions in a process, particularly processes as complicated and intricate as those in securities processing and participant accounting.