Alleged Mal – administration

A department of a local authority had deposited a cheque for P385000.00 with one of the banks and in the process the officer who went to deposit the cheque incorrectly missed one digit and instead of writing a digit 8 she/he wrote digit 9, in the deposit slip, however on close scrutiny the digit appears as 8. The teller at the bank was not able to realize this when processing the deposit as she/he could have seen the variance in the name of the account credited. The account the cheque was credited into had all its digits the same as of the complainant except for the digit incorrectly written.

The Officer of the Local Authority inadvertently, inserted the digit 9 which on close scrutiny appears so and not as 8. However, they argued that the bank could have reasonably realized the mistake as the name of the account should have been verified before the transaction was authorized in the system.

Such errors are common especially at peak times this does not however give the banks the leeway not to thoroughly check transactions after posting. The bank offered to refund the customer interest which the customer had lost and apologized for the error. The Local Authority suspecting maladministration on the part of the bank had requested the following information: whose account was initially credited, did they benefit from this transaction error in interest. For purposes of confidentiality this information was only confirmed to the Banking Adjudicator who confirmed to the customer that he is satisfied in the manner in which the matter was concluded without necessarily disclosing the details.