Notice to Financial Institutions Processing Federal Government U.S. Treasury Check Payments — Updated
November 28, 2023
Financial institutions are receiving this notice to communicate Treasury’s plan to implement technology upgrades to their post payment processing systems on December 9, 2023. This message provides additional details in relation to the communication sent on October 30, 2023.
What and when is this happening?
Treasury will be implementing some technology upgrades to their post payment processing systems on December 9, 2023. As a result, there will be operational impacts and benefits to financial institutions.
What are the impacts?
- Check Returns – Checks, in most cases, are scheduled to be returned on date of receipt if the item is received prior to 8:00 a.m. ET. Treasury’s post payment processing system is scheduled to generate a return Image Cash Letter (ICL) file prior to the 12:30 p.m. ET Federal Reserve Bank cutoff.
- Treasury checks that have a stop payment (i.e., cancelled) will utilize the stop payment code of “C” in the return file.
- All returned Treasury checks will continue to be presented to the bank of first deposit.
- Adjustments – Adjustments for duplicate checks, encoding errors, and other processing exceptions will be scheduled to be sent to the Federal Reserve Bank by 5:00 p.m. EST.
- Treasury Check Verification System (TCVS) – Treasury will update TCVS between the hours of 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET with the most recent disposition of checks presented and processed that day. TCVS will continue to use the same codes that reflect issued, presented, cancelled (i.e., stop payment) and stale dated.
Who can I contact?
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Post Payment Modernization group at PPMI@fiscal.treasury.gov.
This communication was sent by the Federal Reserve Banks on behalf of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service.