Do Mint Workers Pocket Error Coins?

My response:

Nope, not at all!

"Typically" does a log of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Very interesting thought Sap.

Yes, people can try and sometimes even succeed in smuggling coins out of the mint, and mints tend to upgrade their security measures whenever a story of "mint worker steals coins from mint" hits the presses, to try to avoid copycat attempts. Most documented mint thefts involve regular coinage, not mint errors.

Coin manufacture on the production floor these days is highly automated - the machines do all the work. All of the actual humans working at the mint are there to make sure the machines are working properly, and to be quality control in case of machine failure. Each and every error coin that escapes is a demonstrable failure of quality control, and that's bad for business - especially if you're trying to sell the mint's high quliaty product to overseas customers. So it's something the mints will put considerable effort into minimizing.


Quality control systems are never perfect - they can never catch 100% of errors. Some will slip through. "So many" is a relative term. Even if the quality control systems in place at a mint catch 99.99% of mint errors, and errors have a low chance of happening in the first place, that still leaves a large absolute number of error coins slipping through the system and into circulation once mintages start reaching the millions and billions.

The ever-increasing mintages of coins does tend to leave the impression that "the number of errors around is going up, quality control at the mint must be slipping", when it's mostly justly applied statistics: a tiny percentage of a very large number is still quite a large number. What does tend to make quality control at a mint actually decrease is inflation: the declining worth of each individual coin over time. If a $1 coin costs 20 cents to make, it's not worth spending more than say an additional 20 cents per coin on quality control checking procedures, or you'll start to severely impact the mint's profitability. If an American 1 cent coin costs 3 cents to make, then quality control measures become severely curtailed as a result of cost-cutting, and a higher percentage of those low-face-value error coins will slip through.

A lot of the error coins on the market are mint state or near-mint-state because coin errors are "different" and do stand out from regular coinage, even to the uninitiated. So the more spectacular errors are not going to last long in circulation, and it's quite likely that the first actual human to look at that error coin will put it aside and not spend it, even if they're not a coin collector. This is indeed an argument I often use here on the forum against people who come here with bogus errors: "if the coin has always looked that weird, how did it get so heavily worn? How did so many people simply spend it and give it out in change without noticing there was clearly something wrong with it?".

If there is an actual increase in perceived "mint-fresh errors" on the marketplace, then I would suspect that the "problem" isn't at the mint, but at the frontline services, the people who receive and handle those freshly-minted coins: the people who work at the armoured car companies, the people in the banks and major retailers who receive shipments of new coins direct from the mint. Those are the people who are fishing the error coins out before you get a chance to find them in change.

If it happens at all these days, it doesn't happen on the regular production room. It's more likely to happen in the die workshop, where all kinds of presses and such might be available to hand-test a die before it gets put into the production room.

Which doesn't answer "how do they get out". I suppose if we all knew that, there'd be a lot more of them - or we'd have heard about the smugglers getting caught and prosecuted. That dime-on-a-nail in Hondo's post is valuable simply because it's unique; it is also clearly a mint sport, since it's a wood nail and there's no wooden objects in the coin production room these days for a shiny new nail to potentially have fallen down from, and Jarden Zinc, the manufacturer of penny blanks, doesn't make nails. Whoever made it obviously smuggled that nail into the mint, and probably used the same method to smuggle it back out again.

It would frankly be easier for me to believe that that nail is a complete counterfeit made from fake dime dies and was never inside the Mint building. But everyone including the TPGs seem to believe it's from genuine dime dies, so I guess that possibility has been rejected.

I'm sorry to say that here in the US you need to add the USPS to the list of usual suspects. Theft within the post office in my neck of the woods is rampant and organized, as in gang related.