A character reading system efficiently and quickly applies an optical verification process to detect magnetic ink character misreads. In the system, a magnetic ink character reading device reads magnetic ink characters on a processed medium and generates magnetic ink character data, an image reading device scans an image of the processed medium and generates image data, and a position calculator calculates positions of magnetic ink characters on the processed medium and generates magnetic ink character position information. A communication controller sends the magnetic ink character data, image data, and magnetic ink character position information to a host device which includes an optical recognition device that optically recognizes select magnetic ink characters from the image data based on the character position information. By selectively applying optical verification (e.g., only when character misread by the magnetic reading device is high), verification is required less frequently and high speed processing is enabled.