You may he interested in the EU SPreadsheet Risks Interest Group which talks a lot about the problems of error checking and auditing spreadsheets.

http://www.eusprig.org/

Ray Panko also has some excellent work on this.

http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/

Personally: yes, spreadsheet use is scary. They're error prone; hard to audit; overly trusted. One person will create a very complex spreadsheet. If that person moves on the company is stuck with a mostly opaque blob created by someone who hasn't had any training in creating readable maintainable code. There are risks for sensitive data to be inadvertantly distributed to the wrong people.