Payment by phone turns into nightmare
Paying bills electronically may be convenient, but what should have been a routine debit turned a local resident into one angry account holder.
Faced with an overdue Comcast bill, Ruth Santek of Washington authorized a $313 check by phone May 5.
On May 9, she saw the payment had been deducted from her checking account, not once, but twice, causing the account she shared with her daughter to be overdrawn, bouncing five other checks and automatic payments.
“I had a migraine for two days working on this,” Santek said, calling the situation “a nightmare.”
Santek contacted her bank, WesBanco, which directed her to Comcast.
Regarding her conversation with Comcast in Philadelphia, she said the communications giant, with whom she has had phone, cable television, digital and security services for the past six years, placed the blame on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, center of a nationwide payment system
The Federal Reserve, called in shorthand, “the Fed,” was established in 1913 by Congress as the central banking system of the United States. There are 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, and Pittsburgh is a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The Fed’s website notes it collects and processes millions of checks and other payments each day.
Santek called the Fed , and the person who answered said the Fed was not responsible.
Exasperated, Santek phoned the Observer-Reporter last week. “I have been on the phone literally every day,” she said. “If you don’t pursue it, nothing’s going to get done.”
One of the Comcast payments was restored to her account May 17, but she and her daughter are left with fees stemming from the checks that bounced in the interim.
Comcast did not respond to an email about the issue.
Brian Egan, senior vice president in the retail payments office of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said May 19 of the double debit, “It doesn’t happen often, but it happens often enough that there are processes in place.”
A “reversal file” was sent for items that were duplicated, Egan said, and the Santeks’ account also received an offsetting credit.
As to fees imposed while the account was overdrawn, Egan said policies vary from bank to bank. The federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau at www.consumerfinance.gov has a prominent notice flagged, “Submit a Complaint.”
Jean Tate, spokeswoman for the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, said what happens between a customer and a financial institution after a situation like Santek’s “becomes an issue of her own agreement with her depository institution. There are extensive industry standards and rules that have been created to handle the payment process efficiently.”
Egan added there is a “process in place to make everybody whole. How a bank implements that can vary.”
Although WesBanco’s president of the Western Pennsylvania market, Michael A. Mooney, acknowledged receipt of an email from a reporter Monday information about his bank’s policies, he did not followup with details. Santek said the manager of her WesBanco branch said she was not the only Comcast customer to experience a double debit and instructed her to send a fax to Comcast.
The technology driving electronic payments has apparently raised enough concern that the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta website this month posted a 38-page “working paper” on risks in faster payments by the bank’s Vice President Julius Weyman.
“The United States has no public authority with broad power over payments systems,” Weyman wrote. “This represents a fundamental difference in the U.S. banking landscape compared with countries that have implemented a faster payment scheme.”
Egan said, “There is no perfect system in everything. What we’ve tried to do is understand where potential problems can arise.”
Her payment was made in duplicate, but Santek has only one way of making sure she does not repeat her situation.
“I’ll never do a check-by-phone again, ever,” she said.