I would have missed this if it hadn't been mentioned in the wonderful ACM Risks Forum. It's a fairly typical story of computer failure imperiling people's lives and livelihoods (via rent increases for public housing that people on public assistance couldn't afford to pay), but it wasn't the software error that leapt out at me, it was an offhand description of the problem in the third graf:

Residents affected by the miscalculations were ordered to appear in Housing Court for nonpayment of the extra rent, tried in vain to convince building managers that there had been a mistake and lived in constant fear of losing their homes because they could not or would not pay the extra money -- often as little as $50 to $200 a month -- that the agency claimed it was owed. [emphasis added]

As little as $200? For people on public assistance? The bottom end of that range is a poor household's food or transportation budget for a week; the top end for the whole damn month. What copy-editor left that description in (or worse yet, inserted it)?

Maybe the only readership the Times is interested in keeping has so much spare cash floating around that an extra couple grand a year goes mostly unnoticed, but I don't think so.