While all currency is technically legal tender, there has been an effort lately to clean up the state of dollar bills in circulation in the country. The Bureau of Engraving, the Secret Service and the Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence (ACD) Steering Committee have banded together to create and launch an initiative that would now require both retailers and financial institutions to stop accepting mutilated dollar bills.

This process will start in October, and it will be a good first step meant to improve the security of the monetary system. But the most important question to answer in this cleansing process is, what counts as a mutilated bill?

How can you tell if your dollar bill is “mutilated”?

According to the Federal Reserve there are several reasons why a bill might get damaged or “mutilated”, the most common being because of “fire, misuse, or even deterioration from burying money.” Anything that can mean that the bill now has cuts, damaged ends, discoloration or any other marking that may distinguish it from an intact bill (notes written on it, for example).

In an effort to eliminate these bills from circulation, the Fed has instructed banks and retailers to stop accepting them, especially the more damaged ones, starting with the one dollar bill, as it is the most commonly used one and the one that gets deteriorated the most and the quickest.

Banks will have to make an extra effort, they will have to reprogram their ATMs to stop accepting any mutilated bills and instead redirect customers inside so that a teller can inform them on how to proceed. Some authorized locations will be able to just exchange the damaged bill for a newer one of the same value, but if the piece is too far gone, it will have to be sent to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) directly to make a claim and get it replaced.

A Fed currency representative explains “The BEP will evaluate the note. They have special tools to examine the authenticity and assess the full value of the note. After they do that, they can issue a check back to the consumer”.

Since this can be a hassle, the best thing to do is to stop accepting damaged bills as payment when offered, and, if you noticed you have one in your possession, exchange it as quickly as possible in an authorized location before the damage increases and you do have to mail it in. If you deal in cash often and have many instances of mutilated currency, save them and send them all in batches, that way you can at least save on postage.

The purpose of the elimination of these bills

There are currently seven denominations of bills: $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100. While the $500, $1,000, and $10,000 bills are not being printed anymore, they are still in circulation as they are only taken out once they are mutilated. This means that there are a lot of old bills being used with outdated security measures, which make them the perfect target for counterfeiters and other criminals.

The swift removal of damaged currency will also help the government start to take out of circulation some of these counterfeit bills that are being passed around as legal tender. This way, they can be replaced with new bills with updated security measures.

In fact, there is already a plan in place to start the substitution. The Federal Reserve will introduce new designs for the $5 bill between 2032 and 2035, the $20 bill in 2030, the $50 bill in 2028 and $100 bill between 2034 and 2038. The new measures will ensure that counterfeiting the currency

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is harder and will protect the U.S economy for years to come.