Whats the deal with check printers? The closest they come to offering a politically themed check is a background of the flag. Hardly a statement.
Is illeagal to print up checks that are pointedly political?
Years ago an artist friend of mine printed up checks that had famous photos in the background of war atrocities; the naked vietnamese girl running away from her bombed village, the killing of a suspected viet cong by the chief of police, mei lei, the mushroom cloud of nagasaki etc. Of course this was an art project and I don’t think it saw the light of day.
But, copyright issues aside, could they be printed?
Years ago I saw an ad for checks with a drawing of a cranky-looking old man giving the finger, mooning, etc. The idea was that you used these checks to pay your bills as sort of an “Up Yours” to the payee. As far as I could tell it looked like a real thing.
I looked into the legal requirements for checks many years ago (late 1970s, and again in the early 1980s). Some funny stories resulted, including a few that made it into the campus and local papers (e.g. a friend successfully deposited a check written on a chalkboard, though he did get assessed a special handling fee)
By the late 1980s/early 1990s, this ceased to be an interesting subject, because some accounting/budget programs (including, IIRC the predecessors to today’s Quicken and Intuit) allowed you to print a negotiable check on an ordinary printer. It’s been a while since I’ve noticed that ability, however.
I have seen MICR (magnetic) ink sold for bubblejet printers, which suggests that this is still a viable option as far as the check clearinghouses are concerned, and though you should consult your own bank, I would imagine that the clearinghouses establish the industrywide standards. (There is no legal requirement that a check use magnetic ink, or even the standardized OCR typefaces, but you might be risking a special handling fee if you don’t at least use the banking OCR font to create a properly formatted field for the bank ID, the account number, the check number, etc. )
The laws and standards vary by nation, of course, but that doesn’t keep most “domestic” checks from foreign countries from being negotiable. The actual requirements for a check are really quite minimal and commonsense.
I suspect that the lack of advertised strongly political checks is mostly a result of the conservatism of the banking industry. I have certainly seen strong political statements on checks in the past. You might try contacting some of the major check printing companies and asking for their full catalogue (or perhaps simply asking them about political checks. IIRC, some organizations offered custom checks to their members as a fundraising or promotional tool (the John Birch Society comes to mind, though I can’t recall what their lines of checks looked like).
I know that both specialty and the biggest bulk check printers offer designs that you simply don’t see in the various “general public ads” – e.g. religious themed checks that re stronger than the ones in their general advertising pamphlets. In this day and age, we rarely see other people’s checks; most checks either go to mindless inanimate corporations or to personal acquantances. They have mostly become a convenient way to send money vs. the vital tool they were before ATMs free us from the infamously brief “banking hours” of our local branches.
At least for the mainstream check printers that your bank will refer you to. The market for such overtly political checks is rather small, compared to their base market.
But political checks are readily available. Usually they are sold by smaller suppliers, and are often promoted/advertised by political groups. So you need to look there, rather than at the general check printers market. Look in back of magazines for these groups, and you will see ads for targeted political checks.
Personally, I can recall seeing gay/lesbian checks, feminist checks, black checks, democratic/anti-Bush checks, republican checks, pro-union checks, environmentalist checks, animal liberation checks, anti-abortion checks, and scads of religious and christian fundamentalist checks. No doubt many more are available.
Note that you will probably have to pay considerably more for these checks.
You can print checks on your computer, and put whatever image you want on them. All the check needs is the “usual info”-- the parts you fill out, plus the bank routing number and account number, it doesn’t need to be in magnetic ink at all. Also we note that there are various software packages that allow printing out checks on regular computer printers, such as Quicken.
Of course, there isn’t any place that has to accept them at face value, and you would lose out on various anti-counterfeiting benefits available on commercially-printed checks now… -but if you printed them in advance, you could print the payee and amounts on them anyway. If it was a regular bill you were paying, then the first time they might hold it and any merchandise for a day and call the bank and verify it’s legit and cashable–but after that, they will probably remember you from then on.
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While this is technically true, it’s a very bad idea. Financial institutions rely on MICR ink to mechanically process checks. Non-MICR encoded checks reject from the automated system must be hand processed. This means:
your check is far more likely to be delayed;
your check is far more likely to be processed/posted incorrectly;
you will likely be surcharged for each rejected check;
in some cases the financial institution will “suggest” that you use MICR encoded checks or take your businiess elsewhere.
All of the above also applies to checks with a poor MICR line (not correctly aligned, too little ink, line not straight, etc) and checks printed on poor quality paper.
Does anyone have personal experience with non-standard non-MICR checks? What are the handling fees likely to be and who pays them, the check writer or the payee?
I work as a door-to-door fundraiser and I’ve had a surprising number of people tell me (convincingly) that they really want to donate, but don’t have cash and are out of checks. (I just ordered more, they always say.) I’ve always thought about telling them to hand-write a check on a scrap of paper, but I wasn’t sure about the requirements or the problems I or they might run into.
Some organizations offer checks with a design that shows your position. I believe I have seen ads for checks from the NOW, the ACLU, and perhaps the UAW.
Yes that much is true, but then nowadays most places are using electronic transfer anyway–so the real checks are processed at the payee’s bank, not at the payer’s bank. Most places (at least in the US) destroy them normally anyway; you normally have to pay an extra fee to get the cashed check returned to you at all now. …The payee can’t reject the check without attempting to verify if it is cashable, and so it’s their problem. All your bank will see is the regular electronic transaction anyway.
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So does this mean I can have people hand-write a check to PIRG or Sierra Club without a problem? Since we’re soliciting donations, a small processing fee probably won’t upset anyone if the alternative is no donation, but I don’t want the donor to get stuck with a fee or hassle from the bank and blame us for it.
There used to be such a thing as “counter checks”, which were basically blank check forms available on the counter in the bank lobby, for use when you forgot your own checks. I suppose you could gt something like that.
Blank check stock is available at office supply stores. Your organization could get that , and even pre-print it with their name filled in. Then all the donor would have to do is fill in the amount, and their bank routing number & account number. You could even send those to your organization’s office, where someone could compuuter print those numbers onto the bottom of the signed check. Then it should process thru the banking system just like any other check.
But you might have some problem getting people to give you their bank routing number and account number at the door. With all the identity theft, etc. nowdays, people may be reluctant to do this. And they might not even know where to get those numbers, if they are out of checks. The bank routing one, in particular, is seldom printed on bank statements.
Anyway, you’re assuming that they really are out of checks, instead of this just being a tactful way to tell you NO. Personally, I never,ever give donations to solicitors who come to my door. I don’t even listen to their whole spiel, but politely leave as soon as I recognize it as a solicitation.
This is really true only at banks that haven’t upgraded their check processing equipment in the last 20 years or so. Which probably means some little bank in Podunk, Iowa, maybe.
But the whole magnetic ink printing is a 1960’s technology, which has been surpassed by the whole scanning/OCR technology. Most banks use scanners which read the printed numbers, rather than depending on the magnetic ink pattern recognition. If the number are printed clearly, in the proper font, they will be processed without problems by most banks. Some of the companies selling laser & inkjet computer checks guarantee that their checks will be accepted by your bank, or they will pay the extra charges.
And if you’re really concerned, there are toner cartridges and ink jet cartridges available with MICR ink. But rather expensive, and not really necessary.
Absolutely, positively, unequivocably not true. The financial institution that I worked for cleared more transactions per day than any other in the world, including the Federal Reserve Bank. 95% of those transactions were processed through proof machines and sorters that relied on the MICR encoding. OCR and voice recognition has made some very limited inroads but the reliability of each falls far short of what’s needed to process huge volumes of paper.
With the advent of Check 21 legislation OCR has become more important on the back end. Once the original check is processed, captured and imaged by the depository bank, OCR is used downstream to complete the posting process. OCR makes sense here, because the imaged check (AKA substitute check) is much more uniform than the original paper check. MICR will cointinue to be the default for front end capture, even when front end capture eventually moves out of the operations center and into the teller line (think of the system some retailers use to scan your check at the register and convert it to an e-payment).
1950’s, actually. First instituted by Fulton National Bank in Atlanta, GA. over the howls of customers who did not trust that new fangled technology.
Maybe, but those will have pre-printed MICR lines. The laser or inkject printer will merely fill in the date, payee, and amount information.
All your bank will see is the regular electronic transaction anyway.