Dept. of Education Issues Erroneous Check for $8.64M

It was a question of a couple of misplaced zeros.

When Midtown lawyer Gary Mayerson opened a check from the city for his clients, he was expecting reimbursement of $86,400 for special-education fees for some autistic children. Instead, the check was a little bigger.

Actually, quite a bit bigger.

The check from the City of New York was for $8.64 million - an amount, according to the Department of Education's chief financial officer, Bruce Feig, that would have actually cleared the bank had Mr. Mayerson deposited it.

Instead, the lawyer wrote a letter to the city comptroller, William Thompson Jr., with a copy to Mayor Bloomberg, saying he has received huge and erroneous checks before. "This is not the first sizable overpayment we have returned to the city," Mr. Mayerson wrote in the April 19 letter, which was obtained by The New York Sun. "I am very concerned that your offices may be hemorrhaging checks like this one to persons who will not act as responsibly as we do."

Mr. Feig said, though, that even if Mr. Mayerson had not returned the check, the city would have recovered the funds. "These are people we have ongoing relationships with," Mr. Feig said, referring to the lawyers who represent children who get reimbursement checks for educational services that are outside the scope of the DOE. "This was a case in which too many zeros were keyed in."

The Department of Education has been working to install special software that would prevent those kinds of manual keying errors, Mr. Feig said. The check was processed by the computer and sent out, but officials said the mistake would have been discovered at the end of the month.