Wires Gone Wrong

Wires: love them or hate them, but for now, it’s how we do business. And sometimes, they get messed up. One of the questions that frequently comes up involves returned wires. The problem occurs both ways, but let’s examine the outgoing wire dilemma. As we all know, lenders and title companies regularly reject and return wires, making our lives, as escrow practitioners, more stressful (if...

Preventing Discrepancies in Your Account

A customer recently asked me why he had so many exception items, and what he could do to mitigate the problem. To be clear, exception items or reconciling items are discrepancies found by during the performance of the monthly “3- Way Reconciliation,” wherein book balances, bank balances and ledgers are all compared. This process involves a line-by-line verification of every receipt,...

Don’t Cancel That Check!

From time to time, we see a trend in trust accounting problems. Lately, it’s been the cancellation of trust account checks that were not outstanding. In other words, checks that had been either previously paid or already canceled. Often, the cancellation results in the re-issuing of the check and subsequent overdraft when it’s discovered that the previous check had been paid. What is...

Out of Balance: Are You Gambling With Your Clients’ Money?

In the course of balancing trust accounts over the last 22 years, I’ve come across just about every circumstance you can imagine. The common stuff — small bookkeeping errors, bank encoding mistakes, wires lost in cyberspace — occurs all the time. Finding one check (among thousands) paid for a penny too much has prompted many a headache. The next level involves offices that are...

Fraud: It Can Happen to You

There really isn’t much to say about the recent rash of fraudulent check activity. I used to believe that with diligence and watchful eyes, most fraud could be prevented. Locking up your checks at night and limiting access to banking materials was advised to keep criminals from stealing and forging your checks. Now, issued checks are altered and blank checks are duplicated. These...