After much hue and cry from the clients, the Bank of Bhutan (BoB) has finally decided to repay the late penalty fee that they had charged their clients with. The problem is mostly associated with the Consumer or Government Employee (GE) loan holders. The bank is already in the process of rectifying the problem. The Chief Executive Officer, with apologies, said that all clients who were charged late fee on this would be re-imbursed accordingly.
The bank officials reasoned that it was because of the shift from the manual banking to digital banking system. It was also due to clogging of the system as the Bank has large number of GE loan account holders.
Different offices and organisations release the salary Cheques just few days before the month ends. It takes some days for the bank to credit the amount to the individual account and by the time it is done, the month is already over. It takes another few days to deposit the amount of those who have availed themselves of the loan from the bank. When it is done it is already the first week of the month. It was on this ground that the consumer or the GE loan account holders were charged with penalty without any fault of theirs.
Accepting the slip-up, BoB’s Chief Executive Officer, Kinga Thsering, says it was mainly because of the large number of GE account holders with the Bank.
“Since all the ministries are located in Thimphu most of the remittances are done here, even if the civil servants are in the other Dzongkhags. Because of the large remittances it leads to the clogging of the system,” the CEO said, adding that at the end of every month close to 12000 remittances were being done, leading to the delay.
Of the total of about 20,000 loan account holders, GE clients account for more than 10,000. “We are carrying out all the rectification that is necessary in the system,” he said.
The bank, in the meantime, will also open separate savings accounts for all loan account holders so that all remittances made into the saving accounts will be picked up automatically onto the loan accounts on the due date. This, banking officials said, would avoid the issue of late fee and penalty charges.
There are more than 200,000 account holders with the Bank of Bhutan.
