Old Style 2006 $5

John1

Interestingly enough, with "only" 409 million notes printed, the uncolored 2006 $5s actually have a shorter print run than the Barr notes (459 million). Still nothing special really, though, unless in pristine condition.

Well, the BEP doesn't always make the most sense, but the best explanation I've heard goes something like this: Going back to series 2003 when the new colorized bills were coming out, the ones still uncolored ($1, $2, $5, $10, $100) changed from 2001 to 2003 whereas the new colored ones ($20 and $50) became series 2004. Thus we have colored and uncolored bills each given their own unique series to distinguish them. This all happened in 2003, so there were actually some series 2004 twenties released at the end of year 2003.
Signatures change, and the series roll over to 2003A and 2004A. The ten got color and thus goes from 2003 to 2004A.
Signatures change again, and everything this time rolls over to 2006. Instead of having unique series to distinguish colored vs. uncolored, the leading letter (for $5s and up) of the serial distinguishes them. $5s and $100s begin with H and everything else begins with I. What really screwed things up was that color was added to the $5s earlier than anticipated because some were being bleached and reprinted as $100s. Instead of creating an orphan series 2008, the leading letter was simply changed to I, thus matching the rest of the already colored denominations.
Definitely a little strange and not really what's been done in the past, but lately the BEP has done some other strange things with series years too... the 2006A and 2009A hundreds.

Yeah, that's why they did it, but it's another kind of strange reason to add the "A" that's never been done before.