US misprinted 30 mln new $100 bills

RT ^ | 08/16/2013 | RT

[TexGrill]

The US is approaching the release date of its new $100 bills, but the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is facing an embarrassing problem: 30 million bills were incorrectly printed, and fixing them will cost taxpayers an estimated $3.79 million.

The new $100 bills were designed to reduce counterfeiting, and were initially scheduled to be released in 2010. But that summer, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing noticed that the bills were being produced with a blank sliver, due to a fold in the paper. The release date was therefore pushed back to 2011, and again pushed back to Oct. 2013.

But additional printing problems could once again delay the release of the “Benjamins”.

The new $100 bills are designed to contain a Liberty Bell that changes its color, 3-D images that move when the bill is tilted, and a hidden message on the collar of Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers. Two currency factories are responsible for printing all US bills.

But the Washington, D.C. factory produced “clearly unacceptable” versions of the $100 bills, according to a July memo that the New Yorker obtained from the bureau. Recent batches that came from the factory were “mashed”, which means they were produced with too much ink and the lines are not as crisp as they should be. The New Yorker compared it to a kid trying “to carefully color inside the lines – using watercolors and a fat paintbrush.”

Once these bills were delivered to the Federal Reserve, they were rejected. Officials have sent back about 30 million of them, and refuse to accept any more bills from the Washington, D.C. factory.

[chainsaw]

And here I always thought that printing money was the ONE thing that the government could do well!

That was before affirmative action jobs took over the printing office.