The government of the micronation of Waltonia has decreed that all payments by cheque should immediately be replaced by online digital transactions. Having brought forward the changeover to digital transactions for political reasons, without considering advice from either banking or computing experts, government officials quickly discover that processing of digital transactions is nowhere near as fast as had been expected. Furthermore, there is significant scope for crashing the entire system with simple errors in transactions, such as incorrect bank details (of either payer or recipient), invalid dates or mismatches between different fields for the amount to be paid. The system developers claim that the new transaction software has been tested
"very thoroughly" by two groups of people – the first being the system developers
themselves, and the second drawn from central bank staff who are soon to lose
their jobs as a result of this change, and are therefore not too particular about
reporting things that, "the machine cannot deal with"....
Despite the transactions themselves being "fully digital", they still need some
backroom processing to manage the "real-world" complexities of moving money
between accounts and guarding against fraud and money laundering. However,
only a tiny proportion of the central bank staff who used to be responsible for
these aspects of transactions have been retained, as the government and the
central bank have been assured that the new system will be much more efficient
than the old "cheques".
On switch-off (switch-on?) day, over 80% of the transactions are processed
successfully. The government is unconcerned, as they have been assured that
processing will get quicker "as the software beds in". Only it doesn’t. By the end
of the first week, there are a whole day’s worth of outstanding transactions. By
the end of the second week, two whole days’ worth are still incomplete ... and
then, in the third week, the whole system crashes due to a "malformed digital
transaction".
Unfortunately, the system developers had gone on holiday, and all staff who used
to process cheques manually have already been redeployed. Indeed, the data
entry equipment they used has been physically scrapped, and only a single
example now remains – in the national museum....
It takes three full days to re-start the system, so by the end of that week, the
transactions are more than a whole week behind – with no sign of
improvement. And, as no software bugs have been fixed by the holidaying
developers, there is no guarantee that the system will be resilient against any
future "malformed transaction".
The delay in payments is having a major impact across the economy, and
Waltonians starts to revert to the ancient processes of barter (where goods and
services are swapped) instead of monetary payments. Not only has Waltonia’s
attempt to present itself as a modern digital state failed, but no tax is collected on
barter, so very soon, Waltonia is facing a major financial crisis.
When the system developers eventually try to return from holiday, they find the
airport closed and abandoned, as nobody is being paid any more – so their plane
cannot even land....
Who are the customers for the cheque-based transaction system?