A part-time worker had the shock of her life after she was ordered to pay more three quadrillion pounds in pension contributions . The blunder at the pensions office in Essen , in the North Rhine-Westphalia area of Germany saw a letter sent out the woman asking for £3,351,978,728,190,661 . The bill is more than a thousands times than the whole of Germany 's annual gross domestic product . How much is one quadrillion ? This graphic shows what one quadrillion pennies would look like stacked on top of each other . The block would dwarf the Burj Khalifa in Dubai , the Empire State Building and London 's Shard . The £3.35 billion is also enough to pay the UK government debt nearly 2,000 times over . In fact , the customer 's real contributions should only have been around a few hundred pounds . A quadrillion , is a thousand times one trillion , ( a million times a million ) in the American system . So a quadrillion is ten to the power of 15 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 . In the British system , one quadrillion is ten to the power of 24 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 . However , in most English speaking countries , including the UK , the American system is the accepted . A spokesman for the office said the mistake was made when a pensions office worker accidentally copied a customer number into the form , rather than the amount outstanding . 'Yes , the letter did in fact go out like that , ' pensions office spokesman Wolfgang Buschfort confirmed to The Local on Wednesday . 'As far as I know , this is the only time anyone has been called on to make such a large incorrect payment . The error was spotted before the office attempted to debit the massive sum from the bank account of the woman , from the Schwarzwald in Baden-Württemberg . Mr Buschfort added that with 26,000 employees working at the pensions office , mistakes were inevitable . The only evidence of the blunder that remained was the eye watering 16 figure demand letter . A part-time worker had the shock of her life after she was ordered to pay more three quadrillion pounds in pension contributions .
A woman was accidentally ordered to pay £3.35 quadrillion to her pension . The mistake came when the company that runs a fund for people with disabilities sent out an email asking if anyone wanted to buy shares in its fund. Blunder by pensions office was discovered before any money was taken .