The Federal Reserve may have done too good of a job redesigning the $100 bill so that it is virtually impossible to counterfeit; the Bureau of Engraving and Printing doesn't seem to be able to produce the bills correctly, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
"This time, recent batches of cash from the Washington, D.C., plant contained 'clearly unacceptable' bills intermixed with passable ones, according to a July memo to employees from Larry Felix, the bureau's director," David Wolman wrote in the New Yorker. "So the Fed is returning more than thirty million hundred-dollar notes and demanding its money back."
The new $100 bills were scheduled to go into circulation back in 2011 but multiple problems with the creation of the new bills have caused the delays. Part of the reason is that the bills are designed to be complicated, thus making it difficult to reproduce. The design includes 3-D parts that move when the bill is tinted, a message on Ben Franklin's collar and colors that would change in the picture of the Liberty Bell, according to MSN.com.
The unacceptable batch of bills that were recently produced suffered from what the industry calls "mashing," according to the New Yorker.
"When too much ink is applied to the paper, the lines of the artwork aren't as crisp as they should be, like when a kid tries to carefully color inside the lines - using watercolors and a fat paintbrush," Wolman wrote.
Thanks to their blunder the fed is no longer going to use the Washington, D.C., plant to manufacture the much needed bills. The Federal Reserve has set a deadline of Oct. 8 to roll out the new bills which will be cutting things very close if they are only being produced at the Fort Worth plant, according to the New York Daily News.
"There are dire consequences involved here because BEP sells Federal Reserve notes to the Board to finance our entire operation," Felix said in the memo obtained by the New Yorker. "If the BEP does not meet the order, the BEP does not get paid."
