RBI asks banks to fix staff accountability to prevent frauds

The Rs 300 crore Citibank fraud has woken up the central bank to the reality of insiders' role in banking frauds. A concerned Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked banks to fix staff accountability to prevent such frauds from happening. The RBI has asked banks to ensure that the reporting system was suitably streamlined so that frauds were reported without any delay. Following the RBI guidelines, banks have already begun setting up a robust real-time system of checks and balances that will include monitoring all transactions over Rs 10 lakh on a daily basis. Now, all transactions of more than Rs 1 crore are being monitored by the banks' top management.  In response to a Right to Information Act (RTI) application, most public sector banks admitted that their employees have been found to be involved in encashment of fake cheques. What concerns the RBI is not just the recent fraud of Citibank, but many others in the past. Employees of many banks have been found involved in a wide range of frauds from counterfeiting to forging documents for loan approvals.