A quote from this article in Fortune magazine got me thinking: maybe the SEC ought to investigate every company that is still using ancient computer hardware.
In retrospect, of course, there were clues, as a Fortune investigation has discovered. The IBM server, for instance, an AS/400 that dated from the 1980s, was so old that some data had to be keyed in by hand, yet Madoff refused to replace it. The machine — which has been autopsied by the government — was the nerve center of the fraud. The thousands of pages of statements printed out from it showed trades that were never made.
Any large financial services company that is still using manual data entry should probably be placed under suspicion!