Patent ID: 8326761

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for identifying duplicate items presented for payment before final posting comprising of the steps of: computing a signature of a first item presented for payment from the first item's magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) data; comparing, by a computing device, the signature of the first item presented for payment with a signature of a second item presented for payment: when the signatures are not the same, posting both items; and when the signatures collide, designating at least the first item a suspect; processing the suspect to confirm that the suspect is a duplicate item; when the suspect is confirmed to be a duplicate item, preventing the suspect from being posted; and when an inquiry file contains at least one suspect that is not determined to be a false positive, evaluating said inquiry file against a rule base comprising at least one threshold rule: when said inquiry file contains more than a threshold number of suspects that are not false positives, directing said inquiry file to a first suspect queue of a universal workstation, wherein each of the suspect items is researched to confirm whether or not the suspected item is a duplicate; and when said inquiry file contains fewer than the threshold number of suspects that are not false positives, extracting said suspects from said inquiry file and directing said extracted suspects to a second suspect queue of said universal workstation, wherein each of the extracted suspect items is researched to confirm whether or not it is a duplicate.