I RUBBED my eyes in disbelief when I saw the numbers on the ATM slip: $5,837. It was five to midnight, Sunday, at my bank's ATM machine in Bukit Timah Plaza and, by my calculations, I was about $30,000 short in my bank balance.
My sleepy eyes opened wide in shock and my groggy brains were jolted into action as I racked my grey cells to figure out what could possibly have gone wrong.
Did I overspend? Nope. Maybe the ATM printer was faulty, I thought, so I did an onscreen account balance enquiry. Same result.
As I do not believe in Internet banking, the only other possibility was that one of the five payees which I had issued cheques to that month must have altered the numbers on my cheque.
Was it the furniture shop where I had bought my new sofa from? After all, the delivery man looked like a thug. Surely it could not be the mistake of my bank (let's call it Bank A) and credit card firm (Firm B) which I had also just issued cheques to pay for my credit card bills.
When I checked the next morning with my bank, I discovered that the huge amount was paid to Firm B.
The teller from Bank A told me that $31,480 was paid out on cheque number 1234 (I cannot recall the exact number). I checked my records which showed that 1234 was the cheque I had issued to Firm B but the amount should have been only $3,480.
I asked the bank teller if she could confirm that the payee on the cheque was indeed Firm B and not some rogue furniture dealer.
The only way it seems was to ask her colleagues at the cheque department to retrieve an image of my cheque - a process which she said could take up to three days.
Surely with all its multi-million-dollar banking software systems, Bank A would be able to know immediately who it paid my money to?
I was not sure if she couldn't or wouldn't but I wasn't going to wait three days. So I called up Firm B whose credit card officer on the phone readily admitted to receiving my generous cheque paying for 10 times of what had been due.
An hour later, the 'cheque officer' from my bank called me to clarify that the bank had indeed erroneously paid out that sum of money to Firm B.
'How was it possible?' I asked politely even though I was seething with rage at such incompetence.
The reply was something like: 'Oh, your comma was rather big so we thought it was the number one.'
My comma is not big, I responded, and even if it were, did you not read the words? Should you not have called me if you had noticed that I had never issued a cheque to my credit card company for anything this much?
I prodded further and found out that even though Singapore's high-tech cheque clearance system scans every single cheque issued, the actual keying-in of the figures into the computer systems by the paying and collecting banks (the bank that collects the cheque for the payee) is done manually.
In my case, it was not one but two bank officers in two different banks who both made the same mistake.
The lesson from this incident: Do not think that these high-tech bank systems are foolproof. Check bank statements diligently every month.
Thankfully, the discrepancy was huge enough for me to notice the error. Had it been a few hundred dollars, I might have just overlooked it completely.
ginlee@sph.com.sg
This article was first published in The Straits Times, Digital Life.
