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Allowed to Charge Customer/Debits After 6 Months?

Question: 
On August 3rd a mistake was found by our accounting department that occurred during conversion in March. 42K of legitimate signature and PIN based debit card transactions occurred during this time that the bank failed to debit customer accounts for. The bank paid the network (STAR) that paid the gas station for the transactions. However, the bank did not debit the customer accounts for the purchases to clear the transactions. Can we, at almost 6 months later charge the customers? I feel we can but we also need to consider possible customer effects of NSF, closed accounts, customer service problem, reputation risk, etc. Our main question is can we process the debits? We will handle the rest.
Answer: 

Answer from Brian: There is no "stale date" on a debit card transaction. The cardholder received benefit for the purchase and the bank is entitled to recover the funds from the unposted debits. The game card "Bank error in your favor. Collect $200." doesn't work in the real world. If the bank makes an error, it wants the $200 back.

Answer: 

Answer from Andy: It has been years, but we did. We discovered that during a midnight IT maintenance function debits would be properly funded to customers, but the other side of the transaction never hit the deposit account. We had to collect many, many thousands of dollars and we detected a pattern of users abusing this. We went through law enforcement in a few cases for fraud. Some customers were keeping the funds in their accounts, others claimed it was an error in their favor. We were liberal in waiving OD fees and in some cases we worked with customers on breaking it into a few payments, but we were not taking that as a loss. You should not either.

First published on BankersOnline.com 9/10/12

First published on 09/10/2012

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