The BuzzCard Center mistakenly redeposited funds into the accounts of a number of unsuspecting students in the morning hours of Wednesday, Nov. 4.
Affected students found upwards hundreds of dollars previously not there when using or checking their Buzzcards that day.
The error took place when the Buzzcard Center received a faulty file from Banner system, which controls various programs such as OSCAR and other Tech data management software. The Banner system had been experiencing problems at the time. The problem file attributed mistakenly caused the Buzzcard Center’s system to redeposit previously deposited funds into student accounts.
“All of the funds that were deposited were funds that had originally come through the Bursar’s office to the BuzzCard Center in the last few semesters,” said BuzzCard Center Director Donald Smith. “Most of these funds were part of previous meal plan contracts.”
The BuzzCard office discovered the error at 7:30 a.m., approximately two hours after it was determined to have occurred. By 12:30 p.m. the problem was rectified and all of the mistaken deposits were reversed.
“While most students who noticed the sudden increase in their funds contacted us to find out what happened, there were a few people who thought that their parents had made deposits to their accounts and decided to spend the funds,” Smith said.
“After the accounts were restored to their proper balance the BuzzCard Center began to contact students who now had negative balances and informed them of the erroneous deposits,” Smith added.
Despite the circumstances, the Buzzcard Center did not lose any money.
Students who spent any of their newly and falsely deposited funds are expected by the Buzzcard Center to pay the money back in that five-hour window are being held liable for those expenses and must pay what money was spent back to the Buzzcard Center. They were then given time to correct their balances.
As of Wednesday afternoon, half of the affected students have corrected their balance. Any affected accounts that remain unbalanced will be added to their student accounts on OSCAR and charged to the Bursar’s office. Students will have to pay through that system and/or the bursar.
After repairing the error on Wednesday, the Buzzcard Center has made additional changes to their system to prevent such an incident from happening again. These changes include fine tuning some of the current error trapping.
“We regret that this error occurred, but we were very pleased to see that the vast majority of Tech students realized that this was an error and did not race out to spend funds that they knew did not belong to them.”