As many will know, Kweku Adoboli was in the news earlier this year with regards to events at UBS. He may or may not be held as guilty of fraud. If found guilty would the people who designed the trade and reporting system ever be found to be an accessory to fraud if they had designed a system with little or no controls (eg requiring passwords) ? I ask because I've been asked to design a trade capture, PnL and risk system for a desk using Access as the repository (mainly because an IT manager doesn't want to give me space on a database server) and am a little nervous of the personal liability !

Looks like you're destined to go down a well trodden path laden with good intent but paved with awful failure. So without going into the inevitable Access is a crazy bad solution chat which others will no doubt add later;1. If you even have the lowest budget for a professional solution - go for that. APM2. If you really really have to roll your own - see number 1.3. Ok so no dice with 1 or 2, try a web based framework (Django, Ruby on Rails) - you will go miles further then with access. It's amazing what you can do with these.

You've never paid attention to any of the licenses you've agreed to when you installed virtually any kind of software? What do they say about liability?

I was asked once for a (very) quick and dirty front-office solution to store exotic trades (low volume, too expensive to customize systems). The solution was a SharePoint list + an Excel front end.FO and Sales teams had write access to the data, but any saved change would generate an automatic email to all control areas. Auditing could track ticket changes as well. It is all about SharePoint standard control with almost no programming from my side.It was not fancy but survived during some years until it was replaced by a much better solution.