For business checking accounts, many banks offer a "positive pay" service, where customers submit files with the dates, check numbers, and amounts of authorized checks they have issued, and only those checks are paid automatically; checks not listed in a file are automatically returned unpaid.
Variations on this service give the customer access to a Web site with a daily exceptions report, or to a list of all checks for amounts greater than some threshold, from which the customer can instruct the bank to pay some checks and return others. The default is usually to return the check unpaid, since Article 4 of the Uniform Commercial Code gives banks a strong incentive to return any item they aren't going to pay before midnight on the next banking day after it was received.
These services used to be fairly expensive, but I see that some banks are now offering them for free or for a modest fee ($40 a month at Chase), perhaps because they shift some responsibility for fraud control to the customer.
Variations on this service give the customer access to a Web site with a daily exceptions report, or to a list of all checks for amounts greater than some threshold, from which the customer can instruct the bank to pay some checks and return others. The default is usually to return the check unpaid, since Article 4 of the Uniform Commercial Code gives banks a strong incentive to return any item they aren't going to pay before midnight on the next banking day after it was received.
These services used to be fairly expensive, but I see that some banks are now offering them for free or for a modest fee ($40 a month at Chase), perhaps because they shift some responsibility for fraud control to the customer.