Oops. Citigroup credits $81 trillion to customer's account

You might be having a bad day, but you’re probably not doing worse than investment banking company Citigroup, which accidentally transferred roughly three times the United States gross domestic product into a client’s bank account.

The customer was only meant to receive $280, but Citi instead credited their account with $81 trillion last April — which not only dramatically exceeds Citigroup’s market valuation of $150 billion, according to The New York Times, but also the combined GDP of the top 10 richest countries. 

The transfer was initially missed by an employee and a second monitoring official, according to The Financial Times. It was caught 90 minutes later by a third employee and reversed several hours later. Citi described the incident as a “near miss” — incidents where banks authorize the wrong amount of money, but are able to recover everything — marking the latest accident in a string of errors at the company.

Last year, an internal report at Citi described 10 "near misses," each involving $1 billion or more. The bank has come under scrutiny for the integrity of its internal controls ever since it accidentally wired $900 million to creditors involved in a fight with beauty company Revlon five years ago.

The Revlon incident led to the resignation of then-CEO Michael Corbat. Jane Fraser, who took over, has said fixing regulatory controls and managing risks is her “top priority,” but Citi still faced a $136 million fine for risk control and data management issues last year.

For now — to the relief of Citi and the likely disappointment of its customer — the bank says everything is under control.

“Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry,” the company said in a statement. “While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls.”