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Bank Error Causes Hundreds Anguish Banking Error Causes Company to...

Soho Artistes today announced that hundreds of their artists have suffered both anguish and financial costs due to a bank error. The major high street bank (which cannot be named for legal reasons) with which the company has conducted business rejected over 500 cheques which they wrongly believed to be counterfeit.



Soho Artistes Ltd recently setup an internal payroll system for doing large cheque runs for their artists, which included printing customised cheques. The company'ss bank was contacted in June 2006 in order to inform them of this new business process. The bank did not provide any support, but instead offered to send more cheque books, of which only one was delivered.



Soho Artistes then queried several sources regarding in-house cheque printing, including the Financial Service Authorities and APACS, the UK trade association for payments; and then based on the Best Practice Guidelines, their in-house system was developed and deployed.



Once deployed, Soho Artistes ran a small payroll run to 25 of their artists, which went through the bank system, and only on two occasions did a bank make a query.



's8220;I received a call from the bank asking me to confirm that these were to be paid,'s8221; said Frank Temple, Managing Director of Soho Artistes Ltd. 's8220;On each occasion the caller said they would make a note on our account that these were valid cheques. I then received a call from the bank's8217;s fraud department again asking if they were to process these cheques, to which I agreed.'s8221;



Over the course of the following week, several more payroll runs were completed and statements were sent out to artists. Within days, Soho Artistes received telephone calls from their artists stating that their cheques had been returned marked as fraudulent.



Once again, the company'ss bank was contacted, only to find that while some of their cheques were being honoured, others were being processed to the point of showing as being honoured and then drawn back from artists's accounts.These artists are all now beginning to incur bank charges which may well reach over £15,000 in total. Soho Artistes has over 1200 artists on their books ranging from 16-80 years old. This incident is causing several of the elderly artists to suffer anguish, heart palpitations and blood pressure, because the bank is refusing to answer any of their questions.



Due to this major bank error, Soho Artistes is facing terrible PR issues like artists believing that the company cannot meet payment of these cheques which is not the case.



's8220;Business is being lost by the fact that phone lines have been jammed with calls, which is causing a ripple effect through the industry, and we have seen a reduction in take up from our castings,'s8221; said Frank Temple. 's8220;We will never know the actual cost to the business which we have worked so hard to build up over the last 18 months. And the bank is offering no support or access to a decision maker within my branch. If they continue in this manner I will lose my reputation and my business.'s8221;

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