1. A phase angle based magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) system, comprising: a segmentation system for segmenting inputted MICR data into sets of temporal data for different inputted characters; a Fourier system for generating a set of phase angle components from the temporal data for each segmented character, wherein the set of phase angle components comprises a plurality of harmonics; a phase angle difference calculation system for calculating a phase angle difference between adjacent harmonics of the plurality of harmonics to generate a set of phase angle differences; and a matching system for comparing the set of phase angle differences with each of a set of reference waveforms to determine an identity of the inputted character.