KEY POINTS:
A bank has compensated a customer after he complained to the Banking Ombudsman that a teller had miscounted a pile of notes he deposited.
The case was cited in the annual report of Banking Ombudsman Liz Brown as an example of the types
of complaints being made.
Mr C had calculated the cash deposit at $7000 when he took it to the bank in denominations of $50, $20 and $10 in plastic bags.
The teller sorted the notes into piles by denomination and took the largest pile behind a pillar where he weighed the notes on scales. He returned to the counter, calculated the total, then said the total was $1000 less than the amount on the deposit slip.
Mr C protested and another teller checked the notes and she agreed with the total arrived at by the first teller.
As several people were waiting in the queue Mr C accepted the receipt for the reduced amount.
Ms Brown found the bank's security video did not show the entire note-counting process. Although there was no evidence of dishonesty, the teller should have counted the cash in front of the customer.
Ms Brown recommended the bank pay Mr C $1000, plus a small sum to compensate for inconvenience.
In another case, Mrs N discovered the bank had given her abusive former partner copies of statements on her personal account from September 2006 to May last year. After the Banking Ombudsman's inquiry, the bank accepted its mistake. Mrs N received $2000 and a written apology.
CASE STUDIES
* Ms A's bank incorrectly told her she wasn't entitled to cancel a direct debit authority.
* Mr B's application for a personal loan was declined because of an unpaid debt incurred by his former wife on a shared credit card.
* When Mrs C and her husband separated, she told her bank she wanted nothing more to do with him. Four years later her name was on his overdrawn account and a credit agency came calling.
* A couple were told the bank could lend only $325,000 for their house building plans - $110,000 less than they had been told two months earlier. They got $6000 compo for stress, embarrassment and their disrupted planning.
