Sure, you may slip up on the job from time to time. A lost file here, a forgotten email there - maybe you've even missed a presentation.

But it's doubtful your blunders ever caused this much chaos: one hapless TD Bank employee has cost his company $96 million.

That's not a typo - the worker "incorrectly priced financial instruments" to the tune of ninety-six million.

Toronto-Dominion Securities says the employee is no longer with the company, and small wonder.

The snafu occurred in London, and the former staffer is co-operating with regulators, but other details are not forthcoming.

"What I can tell you is we had a senior trader in our London office leave our employ on Monday, June 23 and upon transitioning his accountabilities we identified incorrectly priced financial instruments," spokeswoman Simone Philogene explains.

The financial instruments were credit index swaps - complex futures or derivative contracts used by traders to spread credit risks. In this instance, the trader most likely priced the instruments higher than their value, which means that TD was recognizing a profit when there wasn't any money being made.

"It's an account we trade for the bank, so there's no client money involved," Philogene outlines.

Norman Levine, Managing Director of Portfolio Management Corp, outlined how it may have happened.

"Assume it's like a stock. It's not. But say it's a stock, and [the employee] is saying it's worth 'X' when was it really worth 'Y.'

"As the price changed more and more from the real market, and the real loss kept getting bigger and bigger, and I'm sure the trader hoped things would turn around and go his way, and he'd get out of the mess, and apparently it did not," Levine hypothesized.

The consequences could be severe.

"It's possible down the line this employee could be charged with fraud, and it's a significant amount of money. But that will be up to the regulators and the authorities to decide."

However, if your money is with TD, don't despair.

"The good news for shareholders is, it's not going to have an effect. And $96 million is not a lot of money in the scheme of TD being worth tens and tens of billions of dollars. It's not going to affect your their stock price at all. It's more of an embarrassment to the company than anything else," he concluded.

Still, most agree it shouldn't have happened. "We are very disappointed that this has occurred," TD Bank Financial Group chief executive officer Ed Clark notes in a brief statement. "Our company has a strong risk culture and we deeply regret this incident. We take this very seriously and will make every effort to ensure that this doesn't happen again."

The shocking error has left many worried how one employee could have caused this much havoc - and feeling a lot better about their own mistakes.

With files from The Canadian Press