Accountability is one of the major factors in business, and should be insisted upon.
I agree with the principle.
But productivity is an important objective, too, in a society like ours. We count on improved productivity for our standard of living. The cost of labor to look bank errors is tremendous. It's not the bank's cost, though. You and others are providing the labor for free as a function of your stand on principle. If you have nothing more productive to do with your time, then there's no harm. If you are redirecting your productive energies towards auditing when you could be producing something, however, maybe upholding that particular principle is a negative factor in our economy.
In the eighties, one of the productivity improvements was to change the way things are audited. The government was especially unproductive. They had zero-tolerance rules that required teams of accountants to work endlessly to find every last dime. Needless to say, accountants don't work for dimes. The government finally figured out that it was not cost effective to spend more money finding the error than the amount of the error. Duh. You might stay that there is a principle at stake and there is, but it can be penny wise and pound foolish to enforce.
Banks, and other financial institutions, depend on their computers to do everything for them, but a computer, as with any other machine, functions only as well as the operator is competent.
Bank computer systems work fine. They can move money around and they can add and subtract flawlessly. Other than criminal activity, the only real opportunity for error is the input error. Most input errors are self correcting. Yes, they happen, but they're not that common. Before I gave it up, I balanced a checkbook for a good fifteen years without once encountering a bank error, although I found plenty of my own.
When transactions are virtually all automated as mine are, particularly if you do your own input on the computer, there's a better chance of my winning the lottery than encountering a bank error downstream. |
