Citigroup employee accidentally credits $81 trillion instead of $280 into customer’s account. Here’s what happened next

The US-based multinational investment bank Citigroup's employees accidentally credited $81 trillion to a customer's account instead of $280 due to an operational error, reported the news portal Financial Times on Friday, February 28.

According to the news portal's report, this error from the US-based investment bank took hours to reverse the transactions, a “near miss” which shows the bank's operational issues it aimed to fix in front of the banking regulators. 

The error occurred in April 2023 and was missed by a payments employee, and the second official, who was assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared the next day for processing, reported the news portal, citing people aware of the development.

According to the news portal's report, a third employee caught the error after one-and-half hours of the transaction and was then reversed several hours later.

Due to the operational error, no funds were left with Citigroup, which termed this a “near miss” in front of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the US Federal Reserve. A bank can reverse the process of the wrong transaction if a wrong amount is credited in order to recover the funds, according to the report. 

According to the Reuters news agency report, Citigroup, in an email statement, said that its “detective controls” identified the error between two ledger accounts and reversed the transaction entry. The institutional lender also added that the incident had no impact on the bank or the client.

Past Errors

According to the news portal's report, Citigroup made 10 near misses of $1 billion or more in the last one-year period, which has reduced from the 13 near-miss levels the previous year.

According to the news report, these near misses do not need to be reported to banking regulators, hence, no comprehensive public data is available on the frequency across the sectors. 

Citigroup has refused to comment on this development as per the news report.

The US-based multinational investment bank is investing more into addressing its compliance issues, referring to regulatory penalties for risk management and data governance, according to the report citing chief financial officer (CFO) Mark Mason's comment from January.

“We saw the need to invest more in the transformation on data, on technology, on improving the quality of the information coming out of our regulatory reporting,” said Mason, reported the news portal.

The news report also highlighted that Citigroup was fined $136 million for the insufficient progress in tackling these issues and in the firm was also fined $400 million over some risk and data failures.