How to lose 4.1 billion in a report.

How do you mis-report 4.1 BILLION dollars?

Thats a lot of moolah, regardless.....the National Australia Bank up to its ears in some black-art-of-accounting-practices including $360 million lost in "unauthorized trading in foreign exchange options". (Note the article lists the figure at the beginning of findings as $180 million which after further investigation, DOUBLED)

Nevertheless, we're assured shareholder's profits are in safe hands NAB is set to take the axe to 4662 workers (>10% of their workforce).....arseholes, perhaps they'll employ monkeys.

On the bright side, I suppose any errors could be then listed as "monkey error". A headline I'd one day like to see.

NAB blames monkeys for annual report mistake

The head of the National Australia Bank (NAB) says human error is most likely responsible for a $4.1 billion mistake in the company's annual report for 2005.

NAB chief executive John Stewart says the level of lending to the real estate construction sector was overstated because of a classification error as the bank switches from manual to automatic systems.

The company requested its shares be placed in a trading halt this morning, pending an explanation to the Australian Stock Exchange.

Mr Stewart says an investigation will be launched into why the error occurred.

"We have systems. We've been admitting we're on a turnaround and parts of the bank are broken," he said.

"We have to fix them, we are pretty sure, our auditors are pretty sure all our numbers are right.

"But we keep saying, we don't know what we don't know."

And for further NAB weirdness see this Crikey article on Anne Jackson who was auditing the foreign exchange trading desk that went bad, was a previous auditor on the Australian Wheat Board and is currently "program director for the BASLE(sic) II accounting changes."

Could these accounting changes be the above reason for the missing $4.1B?