Brussels - There were red faces in the Belgian Post Office on Thursday after a banking blunder handed out bonanza payments to some 50,000 unemployed people. The 40-million-euro (60-million-dollar) mistake came after the country's employment agency, CAPAC, organized a dummy run of a new payments scheme ahead of its introduction on November 12.
In the exercise, CAPAC sent a series of payment orders to the Post Office, which acts as the agency's bank.
The Post Office was meant to enter the details into a special test computer system, to make sure that CAPAC had put the information in the correct format.
But Post Office staff somehow failed to notice that the transaction was a technical exercise, and proceeded to enter the details into the genuine payment system, transferring around 800 euros each to 48,860 lucky unemployed.
The Post Office will now try and claim the money back. In the interim, the people who received the payment should not try and pay it back themselves, but they should not spend it, CAPAC officials told the German Press Agency dpa.
