The city of London is apologizing after pre-authorized property tax payments, totaling $17-million, were accidentally taken twice from the bank accounts of thousands of Londoners.
Withdrawals were made from 33,000 accounts as normal on June 30, but on Wednesday the same accounts were mistakenly dinged a second time, according to a news release from the city issued Thursday afternoon.
"The cause of the problem is simply human error," said Jim Logan, division manager for taxation and revenue for the city. "A file was transmitted incorrectly a second time. As soon as we found the error we acted to have the file reversed."
Londoners with pre-authorized debit should expect the money to be refunded into their bank accounts Thursday night or Friday, depending on their financial institution. The city will also reimburse anyone who received any non-sufficient fund charges due to the error.
Logan reassured the city will take steps to prevent Londoners from being double charged on their property tax payments again in the future.
"We have had pre-authorized payment for more than 20 years and no incident like this has ever occurred before," said Logan. "We will be reviewing exactly what happened and putting in place controls to prevent anything like this from every happening again."
Anyone with questions about the error are encouraged to the City Property Tax Office at 519-661-4540 or email taxoffice@london.ca.
