In computer crime, salami slicing is the illegal practice of stealing money repeatedly in extremely small quantities, usually by taking advantage of rounding to the nearest cent (or other monentary unit) in financial transactions. Salami slicing is most often performed by employees of the corporation that handles those transactions, and is often hard to detect.
Salami slicing is the subject of the films Superman III (1983), Hackers (1995), Office Space (1999), and the country song "The Ballad of Silicon Slim".
A documented occurrence is found in Thomas Whiteside's 1978 book Computer Capers. It documents how a programmer at a mail-order company diverted money from rounding down sales commission into a phony account for 3 years before he was caught.
"Salami slicing" can also (often pejoratively) refer to any practice of doing something in small parts to achieve something that would not otherwise be possible or easy, for example, breaking up a large piece of legislature into pieces that could be "digested" more easily.
