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Home >> Accounts >> Online Banking/BillPay
Automatic Payment Mixup
I had an apartment a year and a half ago, and they are just now telling me that I didn't pay rent for the last three months. I moved out three months prior to my lease end. I had my payments automatically deducted from my checking account, and assumed they would continue to be doing that until my lease expired. I guess they didn't. They stopped my automatic payments without telling me. Now a year and a half later, they're saying I owe this money, when I thought all along I had paid it. Can a business stop making automatic deductions without notifying the person whose account it is? I thought I would have had to sign something, and also thought they would send me a bill much sooner than a year and a half after I moved out!
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 If you signed a lease that made you responsible for the rent if you moved out early, and if state law sanctions such lease terms, you owed the money, and you don't seem to be disputing that. It seems that someone working for the landlord or rental agency, slipped up and terminated the automatic payments from your account when you surrendered your keys. Most people complain when automatic payments are not stopped when they should be; it's unusual to hear a complaint that payments were stopped early!
If you had been paying attention to your account, you would have seen that the monthly rent payments for those three months had not been taken, and you could have questioned the landlord then. The landlord had no obligation to tell you the payments had stopped. Evidently, you were renting from a large company that simply did not catch up with the fact that it had failed to collect those three months of rent from you until it made a review of its books. Apparently, both you and the rental company should have been paying better attention to matters.
Now that the company's mistake has been uncovered, the company is due its three months rent. You've had the use of those funds for 18 months,but the fact remains that you are owe your landlord that money. If you think he is not due the three months' rent, you probably should check your position with a local attorney familiar with the laws in your state governing landlords and tenants.
Published on BankingQuestions.com 11/10/09
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