P46M ‘mistakenly withdrawn’ during BPI glitch — bank exec
A total of P46 million had been “mistakenly withdrawn” from Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) accounts during a glitch in its system, the bank's president and CEO said.
During a hearing of the House committee on banks and financial intermediaries on Thursday, BPI officials were asked how many “actual withdrawals” were made during the period that their accounts reflected “mispostings,” or either over-debits or over-credits.
“The amount that was mistakenly withdrawn totaled P46 million,” BPI's Cezar Consing told lawmakers. “There were mispostings, and because there were mispostings, there was an amount that, in some cases, that were withdrawn.”
Asked if it was illegal, he replied that it was “accidental,” and noted that “most of this” was already being recovered.
Consing pointed out that most of the amount of “mistaken withdrawals” were “with merchants and small businesses.”
“It’s because of the way small business accounts work. We’re making arrangements with them, one by one, to settle, and as a matter of fact, almost all of them have expressed willingness to settle. It’s just a matter of when we debit their accounts,” he said.
The system glitch affected some 1.5 million clients of the bank. They said half of this number were “over-debits,” while another half were “overcredits.”
Consing noted that the mispostings, on average, amounted to P7,000 each.
He also assured that all of these “have been rectified.”
BPI officials faced House members a day after they were summoned for a similar inquiry of the committee’s Senate counterpart.
The system glitch, they said, was due to a system programmer who was in a rush to post transactions.
They noted that the said employee has been transferred to another post as they look into the incident, adding that she came forward to own up to her mistake.
GMA News