Feb 28 (Reuters) - Citigroup ( C/PN ) erroneously credited

$81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer's account and took

hours to reverse the transaction, a "near miss" that shows up

the bank's operational issues it has sought to fix, the

Financial Times reported on Friday.

The error, which occurred last April, was missed by a

payments employee and a second official assigned to check the

transaction before it was cleared to be processed the next day,

FT said, citing an internal account and two people familiar with

the event.

A third employee caught the error one-and-a-half hours after

the payment was processed and the transaction was ultimately

reversed several hours later, FT said.

No funds left Citi, which disclosed the near miss -- when a

bank processes the wrong amount but is able to recover the funds

-- to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of

the Currency (OCC), the report said.

Citi told FT its "detective controls" promptly identified

the error and that it reversed the entry, adding the incident

had no impact on the bank or the client.

There were 10 near misses of $1 billion or more at Citi last

year, down from 13 the year before, according to an internal

report seen by the FT.

Citi declined to comment to FT on this report. It did not

immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Last month Citi CFO Mark Mason said the bank is investing

more to address its compliance issues, referring to regulatory

penalties for risk management and data governance.

"We saw the need to invest more in the transformation on

data, on technology, on improving the quality of the information

coming out of our regulatory reporting," Mason said.

Last July, Citi was fined $136 million for insufficient

progress in tackling those issues and in 2020, it was fined $400

million for some risk and data failures.