According to The Times, the troubled bank is having difficulty getting back the money because much of it was deposited in accounts at rival banks.
A report by the BBC said the error occurred when payments from 2,000 business accounts were made twice to employees of the said companies.
Santander is reported as having issued a statement on the blunder saying: “We're sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients' accounts.
“None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.”
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When the BBC spoke with one payroll manager who will definitely have questions to answer over the unfortunate error, the anonymous manager said they couldn’t enjoy Christmas and Boxing Day because of the development.
“It ruined my holiday period because I thought I'd paid out hundreds of thousands in error - I thought I had done something wrong
“I thought it was just me and that I was going to get in trouble at work.”
“It's just a complete shamble. How they are going to recover it, I just don't know,” the manager lamented as quoted by the BBC.
Aside from speaking with rivals such as Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank and Virgin Money to help retrieve the money paid into the accounts of their customers, Santander is reported as saying it may contact individuals behind the 75,000 accounts directly if necessary.
The implication of this error is that if the employees of those 2,000 companies have spent the monies already, then Santander could only recover its loss from January payments that the said companies would make into those accounts for their employees’ salaries.
But that would also mean that the beneficiaries of the bank’s error have consumed their January 2022 salaries in December 2021 through no fault of theirs.