Measure twice, cut once!
Dejan Dejanović, a beekeeper, had the intention of buying a clearing in touched unnature at a court auction.
In order to participate in the auction, he had to pay a deposit to the court account. For this reason, he gave the bank a payment slip that he filled out on his own.
However, as payment slips, especially those used to pay obligations to a state body, contain different headings, Mr. Dejanović, in the rush of everyday life, filled out some fields on the payment slip incorrectly!
In the column provided for the name of the court, he indicated the court he intended, but in the field provided for the code of that court (on the payment slip, this field is called “budget organization code”), he indicated the code that referred to another court.
The bank executed such an original (but incorrect!) instruction for the payment of Mr. Dejanović, so funds in the amount of 10,000.00 KM were paid to that other court.
And that’s not the end of Mr. Dejanovic’s suffering! Unfortunately for him, in the meantime, the bank that managed the account of the court that received the money by mistake went into liquidation, due to which the return of the erroneously transferred funds was impossible (because, in the process of liquidation of the bank, the accounts it maintains are blocked!), which turned out to be an insurmountable problem, which caused a delay in fulfilling his obligation to pay the deposit.
In an attempt to resolve the situation, Mr. Dejanović referred to the regulation according to which the bank is obliged to check the data from the payment slip.
Although bankers are experts in their work in making payments, still, according to the Law on Payment Transactions, the one who fills out the payment form (the principal) must correctly identify the recipient and his bank.
When any participant in the transaction is identified by name and number on the payment slip, the bank that receives the payment slip is not obliged, and sometimes is not able to do so, to determine the compatibility of the name and number, and can make the payment both on the basis of the name and based on the specified number.
The law foresees the responsibility of the sender (in our case, Mr. Dejanović) for the correctness of the payment slip that he filled out personally, and the bank is obliged to execute payment orders that, as the law literally says, “identify the recipient with a certain degree of certainty.” Otherwise, it is not bad to know that, in the regular course of things, wrongly paid public revenues (which are, mainly, payments in favor of a state body) are returned to the payer based on the executive decision of the competent tax authority.
What should be learned from the bitter experience of Mr. Dejanović, is that we should be careful when filling out the payment order, because it is not easy, and sometimes it is impossible, to return the wrongly paid funds!
Go through all the sections without haste and compare the data you entered with the data and instructions of the person you need to pay something to.
It is necessary to fill in the columns with correct data, and that the data on the payment slip correspond to each other. And, after that, hand the completed payment slip to the bank employee, who will, on his form, create a payment order and give it to you for signing.
And, remember the saying: “Take honey as food so you don’t use it as medicine!”
A pinch of law…
According to the provisions of Article 9, Paragraph 2 of the Law on Payment Transactions (“Official Gazette of the RS” No. 12/01), it is prescribed that the payer in the payment order must accurately identify the recipient and the destination bank and that when any participant is on the payment order in a payment transaction identified by name and number (which we consider to be the case with the payment of public revenues), the receiving bank is not obliged to determine the compatibility of the name and number and can make the payment either on the basis of the name or on the basis of the number. Finally, in Article 25, paragraph 1 of the same law, the responsibility of the sender for the payment order issued by him is prescribed.