Citigroup mistakenly credits customer account $81 trillion in “near miss”, FT reports

Citigroup (C.N), opens new tab erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer’s account and took hours to reverse the transaction, a “near miss” that shows up the bank’s operational issues it has sought to fix, the Financial Times reported on Friday, Reuters reported.

The error, which occurred last April, was missed by a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be processed the next day, FT said, citing an internal account and two people familiar with the event.

A third employee caught the error one-and-a-half hours after the payment was processed and the transaction was ultimately reversed several hours later, FT said.

No funds left Citi, which disclosed the near miss — when a bank processes the wrong amount but is able to recover the funds — to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the report said.

Citi told Reuters in an emailed statement its “detective controls” promptly identified the inputting error between two ledger accounts and that it reversed the entry, adding the incident had no impact on the bank or the client.