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Home >> Accounts >> Checking Accounts
Can an Old Check Be Paid?
I am confused. Aren't banks supposed to refuse to pay checks that are over six months old? I gave my last year's college roommate a check for my share of the phone bill in November, 2005. She said she lost the check, so I stopped payment on it, and gave her a new one.
I just opened my July 2006 bank statement and found the November check! My bank paid it on July 6, eight months after I wrote it. I know that my stop payment had run out after it was six months old. I didn't renew it because I thought my bank wouldn't pay the old check once it was six months old. When I called them to ask about it, they told me that there's no such thing as a "stale-dated" check. Is my bank right? Am I out the $45?
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 It sounds like you are relying on outdated information you got several years ago. Your bank is giving you a straight answer. It used to be that, when check volumes were lower and much of a bank's check processing was still manual, the date on a check was a lot more likely to get noticed, and it's still likely that, if your check had been presented to a teller for cash, the bank would have refused to pay it based on the date, but when it comes to today's more automated processing at banks, the date on most checks isn't reviewed.
Today, the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) takes automated processing into account. The UCC is a collection of laws that covers the negotiation of checks, among other forms of commercial transactions. It's adopted by each of the states, based on proposals from a national committee of state commissioners who encourage the adoption of uniform versions of these laws. Specifically, the wording of section 4-404 of the UCC (in the "model" version) says that a bank "is under no obligation to a customer having a checking account to pay a check ... which is presented more than six months after its date, but it may charge its customer's account for a payment made thereafter in good faith."
The first half of that section allows a bank to refuse payment of a check that's more than six months old without worrying about getting sued by its customer for dishonoring the check. That covers the situation if a teller catches the date when someone tries to cash it after six months. The second half of the UCC section, however, allows the bank to pay the check if it isn't aware that its customer doesn't want it paid. Generally, that's understood to mean that the bank doesn't have an effective stop payment order on the check, and covers cases in which the bank is not aware that the check is more than six months old.
The UCC says that your bank acted properly. With "0-20 hindsight, renewing the stop payment would have been a better choice, if the cost of doing so didn't outweigh the risk the old check would show up. That leaves you with one place to go to get your money back -- your old roommate.
Published on BankingQuestions.com 8/14/06
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