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Home >> Accounts >> Checking Accounts
My Bad -- or the Bank's?
I wrote a check to a home improvement store to build a sunroom, but I didn't have it built. The check was dated 4/14/06 for $1000.00. I thought that the home improvement store would send me the check back, but they didn't and it has been so long that I forgot about it. On 10/10/06 I received an Insufficient Funds Notice for the $1,000. check that the bank at their discretion paid. The account is an account that I planned to close. It was sitting there with a balance of $1.75. Why would it be at the bank's discretion to manually force a six month old check thru my account without a phone call. I think that this is an unfair bank practice. The way I look at it, the bank had at least a couple of options: (1) They could have bounced the check and charged me a $33.00 fee. My balance would have been $1.75-$33.00 = -$31.25; or (2) They could pay the check, creating an overdraft, and end up with a huge negative balance. ($1.75 balance minus the $33.00 charge and the $1,000. check=$-1,031.25. I was harmed by my bank. Who can I talk to? Nobody at the bank wants to take responsibility.
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 Well, evidently your bank considered you a pretty good customer when the check showed up to be paid. It's not normal for banks to verify the date on checks when they are presented for payment, so the fact that your check was so old is probably not something the bank noticed. All it probably saw was the fact that a $1,000 check was overdrawing an account on which the bank had not had a problem in the past, so the bank may have simply assumed you timed a deposit a little late, but were planning to cover the check.
Clearly, the bank could not have known about the fact you didn't owe the home improvement store the money; nor could the bank have known that you were planning to close the account (unless you had told them that). In trying to extend you the courtesy of paying what appeared to be an inadvertent overdraft, the bank actually caused you a problem.
Contact the home improvement store and ask them to refund your $1,000, since you don't owe them anything (it's too late for your bank to send the check back). Hopefully, the store made a mistake when it deposited your check, and will not give you any trouble on the issue of a refund. If you calmly explain the situation to your bank, they may refund the overdraft fee for you. In the future, if you find yourself in a similar situation, and don't get the check back from the payee, you should protect yourself by issuing a stop payment order to your bank, and renew the order every six months if there is any risk of the check showing up for payment after the stop order expires.
Published on BankingQuestions.com 10/23/06
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