Consumer complaint received 2018-08-24
Product: Checking or savings account — Checking account
Issue: Managing an account — Fee problem
Company: BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION (OK)

I have maintained some degree of banking relationship with Bank of America for nearly 15 years. Over the course of that relationship this institution has made changes to its policies, procedures, and promotions.

These changes usually do not affect our operation but in the few instances where they have, we'd visit a local banking center and come up with alternative solutions. While these solutions would vary, the common goal was to ensure that the services we received were comparable to what was in place prior to the change. 

Recently, one change has been made for which there is no comparable alternative. Earlier this year we began to see a number of fees appearing on our accounts. The fees we were charged for were " monthly maintenance fees '' and " Overdraft transfer fees ''. When we contacted the bank we were told that these are typical fees that we had always been charged and that nothing had changed. After escalating the issue, we had two different supervisors claim that the only difference was that we were just now noticing the fees.

We were able to convince the last supervisor we had to look through our account to verify that there was no such history of us being charged theses fees. He found that in the months prior we were not charged a maintenance fee. He also found several instances where funds were automatically transferred from one account to the other with no overdraft transfer fee. Although he was able to verify our claim, he stated that there must have been some mistake with the system that was behind the reason we weren't being charged.

We later discovered that the system was issuing the charge but immediatley crediting the account in the same amount. This prompted the supervisor to do a little more research and it was ultimately discovered that there had been a change earlier in the year that removed a " perk '' that kept us from incurring these fees.

The supervisor apologized for all of the calls that we had to make to discover this information and said that our account would be credited for any of the fees that we had not already been issued a courtesy credit on. After completing the credit, we were then advised that we would need to visit a banking center to discuss options on opening different accounts that would afford us the same benefits that we had before this change.

We attempted to follow this instruction but was stymied in the process as we discovered that Bank of America no longer offers any account without fees unless you meet new criteria that was established when they made this change. We've since continued to incur these fees.

I can not force Bank of America to change its policy and understand that it's our responsibility to find a bank that does offer services that line up with how we operate. I don't have a problem doing this but it wouldn't be fair to expect us to complete the transitioning of 11 accounts ( Personal, business, and credit ) to another institution in such a short time span. Sufficient time should be allocated before forcing us to be subjected to a new fee structure.