Citigroup Accidentally Credits $81 Trillion To Account Instead Of $280: Report

Washington:

Citigroup accidentally credited an account with $81 trillion instead of the intended $280 before the error was caught, as reported by the Financial Times.

The blunder, referred to as a “near miss” in banking industry terms, was overlooked by a payments employee and a second bank official before being detected by a third employee 90 minutes after the transaction was posted, the newspaper reported late Thursday.

The bank stated that the payment was posted to a client, without specifying the type of client.

The transaction was reversed several hours later, and no funds were ever transferred out of the bank, according to the report.

Citigroup, which holds $1.7 trillion in assets according to Federal Reserve data, said there was “no impact to the bank or our client,” as per a bank statement.

“Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts, and we reversed the entry,” Citigroup said.

The mistake originated from a system blockage that required payments to be entered manually under a program pre-populated with 15 zeros, the Financial Times reported.

In July 2024, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined the bank $136 million for failing to sufficiently upgrade its systems as mandated by a 2020 regulatory order to address poor risk management.

In October 2020, the OCC fined Citigroup $400 million for deficiencies in risk management, data governance, and internal controls.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)