Fed Preparing for New Check Survey

WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve Board is making plans to conduct another survey on the volume of paper checks being written annually. The new survey would be a follow-up study to the one released by the Fed in 2002 which was a revised Retail Payments Research Project Report to one put out by the Fed the previous year. The 2002 study showed consumers wrote 42.5 billion checks in 2000 valued at $39.3 trillion, not the 49.5 billion and $47.7 trillion worth of checks the agency estimated in its 2001 report. The Fed said the corrected numbers showed that check usage probably peaked in the mid-1990s. Tom Lavelle, public informations officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston confirmed the Fed will use the adjusted 42.5 billion check voulume figure as a baseline for the 2004 study.