I just want to take a moment, and tell you that you're wrong about what happens and what matters when a check is deposited (or cashed) and then cleared by the issuing account.
The courtesy amount is the digits. The legal amount is the written expression for dollars.
The legal amount matters, and had you taken your bank to court (if you didn't sign your legal rights over to arbitration), the legal amount prevails.
There are rooms full of people working minimum wage night jobs, to verify checks that have values in conflict with each other, associated documents, or are generally illegible. Something like 90% of checks are verified by OCR, and deposited for an amount often within a margin of $2.50 per deposit.
The remaining ten percent are processed by hand, balancing deposit to written amount, usually within the $2.50 same margin. This represents hours of checking transaction amounts for tens of thousands of transactions, as a fraction of the automated processing. The $2.50 is usually reviewed by managers in an end-of-day report.
For maybe a quarter of a million documents processed in one evening by a room full of around fifty people running OCR equipment (made by IBM and Unisys), and performing manual image review and physical document inspection, maybe 200 are kicked out by the machinery and software to be deciphered by hand.
Sometimes people get lazy, and are on the verge of quitting anyway because night jobs suck, and if you argued until you got your way, you were probably dealing with such a situation.
The courtesy amount is the digits. The legal amount is the written expression for dollars.
The legal amount matters, and had you taken your bank to court (if you didn't sign your legal rights over to arbitration), the legal amount prevails.
There are rooms full of people working minimum wage night jobs, to verify checks that have values in conflict with each other, associated documents, or are generally illegible. Something like 90% of checks are verified by OCR, and deposited for an amount often within a margin of $2.50 per deposit.
The remaining ten percent are processed by hand, balancing deposit to written amount, usually within the $2.50 same margin. This represents hours of checking transaction amounts for tens of thousands of transactions, as a fraction of the automated processing. The $2.50 is usually reviewed by managers in an end-of-day report.
For maybe a quarter of a million documents processed in one evening by a room full of around fifty people running OCR equipment (made by IBM and Unisys), and performing manual image review and physical document inspection, maybe 200 are kicked out by the machinery and software to be deciphered by hand.
Sometimes people get lazy, and are on the verge of quitting anyway because night jobs suck, and if you argued until you got your way, you were probably dealing with such a situation.