Because really, who wants to remind IT people about how much the big boys get?

This company's pension distribution system is a heavily customized version of a well-known package. And it has worked fine for years, says a programmer pilot fish responsible for maintaining it.

But that can't last. “When the chief operating officer retired, he was the first highly compensated employee to get over $1 million in his distribution,” fish says.

“There was one problem: At that time, the file that was used to send the transaction to the bank could only handle $999,999.99. All of the reports were correct, but the one file that needed to be correct was not.

“So instead of having $1.8 million deposited in his account, only $800,000 was.

“I had to manually correct the file and resend it to the bank.

“We never did change the code to fix the issue. The company decided to have a third-party vendor take over that system.”

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