A Citigroup client who was supposed to receive $280 was credited with enough money to pay off the national debt twice over with plenty of change. The customer was credited with $81 trillion in an error that was missed by two employees but caught by a third around 90 minutes after it was processed, the Financial Times reports. Sources tell the FT that it took several hours to reverse the payment, but no funds actually left the bank. The "near miss" was disclosed to the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the sources say.
In a statement, the bank said its "detective controls promptly identified the inputting error" and the same controls would have stopped funds leaving the bank, Reuters reports. The sum, probably too big to make it through any bank's systems, would have been more than enough to buy all the companies on the US stock market, the Guardian notes. According to an internal report seen by the FT, there were 10 near misses of $1 billion or more—which are unusual in the banking industry—at Citigroup last year, down from 13 the previous year.
The FT's sources say the $81 trillion error happened after transfers to a Brazilian client were blocked by a screen for potential sanctions violations. The transactions, adding up to $280, were cleared, but a payment processing employee who had to "manually input the transactions into a rarely used back-up screen" forgot to clear an amount field that was "pre-populated with 15 zeros," the sources say. The transfer, cleared by an official assigned to check it, was caught when a third employee noticed an issue with the bank's account balances. Citigroup said the "episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls." (In 2021, the bank mistakenly sent $900 million of its own money to Revlon's creditors.)
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