If your instinct tells you that your organization needs to tighten IT controls rather than cave to demands for greater user autonomy, here's a story for you: Two employees at Credit Suisse who were charged with bypassing a mandatory reporting system have pleaded guilty to falsifying data and wire fraud. They admitted to manually inputting fake profit and loss numbers in the bank's record system to hide more than half a billion dollars lost, reports Leo King at ComputerworldUK.

U.S. authorities, including the FBI, spent about four years investigating the case, much of which occurred in the bank's London and New York offices. The guilty pleas came from two traders, who admitted to trying to hide losses related to subprime mortgage-backed securities, King reports. Their manager has been charged as well. The three stand accused of contributing more than $500 million to a $2.52 billion write-down that Credit Suisse took in 2008 during the Wall Street meltdown.

The traders had been under severe pressure to avoid revealing losses after Credit Suisse deployed a system that required traders to deliver "flash" reports of profits and losses in real time. They each face as much as five years in prison.

At least one of the traders and the manager are also being charged in a civil suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission. They "periodically directed the traders to change the bond prices in order to hit daily and monthly profit targets, cover up losses in other trading books, and send a message to senior management about their group's profitability," the SEC said in a statement.

For more:
- see Leo King's article at ComputerworldUK

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