While he was working on reconciling the discrepancies in Indonesia,
Leeson learned that the discrepancies account (the “88888 Account”) did
not appear in reports used to control traders. Not surprisingly, they did go
into other reports, such as position statements to the exchanges for margin5
calculations, but internally, this information was prepared less frequently,
and it went through different channels to employees at the bank who had
little familiarity with trading.