The inadvertent accounting blunder made at the government-owned Hypo Real Estate does not only highlight a case of inefficiency on the part of bank personnel.

There may have been similar error in the past that have not been discovered which could put the entire industry or Federal government at a disadvantage.

The First Post reported that the huge amount of 55.5 billion Euro or $78.7 billion was credited instead of subtracted at the financially-troubled bank which caused the gross domestic product of Germany to go down from 83.7 percent to 81.1 percent.

Economic analysts say that auditing standards should be upgraded to avert similar incidents in the future.

A spokesman for the FMS Wert Management stated that the slip-up happened because "collateral for derivatives was not netted between the asset and liability sides."

The miscalculation which altered then public debt figures of the entire nation by 1 percent is a big embarrassment to the finance ministry, observers say.

Opposition leaders said that this was an indication that the ministry is not being supervised efficiently.

Euro News reported that Germany's Free Democratic Party (FDP) deputy Volker Wissing lamented that what happened does not make sense and should be explained immediately. This denotes that there are "exceptional conditions for financial markets, institutions and financial policy."

The Hypo Real Estate Bank is confronted with a serious liquidity deficiency after US Lehman Brothers' became insolvent in 2008. The federal government provided infusions of 10 billion Euro and liquidity guarantees amounting to 145 billion Euro before it was nationalized according to BBC News. It was also reported that the European Commission approved the release of 175 billion of aid to the bank in exchange for major cuts.

HRE is expected to stop all its businesses except the Deutsche Pfandbriefbank wherein the modified balance sheet would be smaller by the end of 2011, BBC News added.