LONDON: Not a week seems to pass when some bank or other wants you to confirm details of your address, supported by passport and utility bill information. For some years, I have had a few euro deposited with the (Irish) branch of Nationwide Building Society.
Recently, some documents arrived, making reference to international tax compliance regulations and wanting to know, for example, if I was or was not a US citizen; if I was or was not a resident in the UK for tax purposes; and if I was none of these, where was I resident?
I am an Irish citizen and live in Ireland. Why do I have to submit to this nonsense (or prying eyes) and make available sensitive information such as my passport details etc? If I don’t comply, are my savings at risk or unavailable? Should I seek guidance from the Central Bank.
I suppose you could say that calling a bank Nationwide UK (Ireland) was bound to cause confusion and this does indeed seem to have been an issue of crossed wires. I note that Nationwide UK has since apologised to customers of its Irish businesses over the letters.
The confusion arises because the UK tax authorities are now obliged to share information on offshore bank accounts held by people who are tax resident in the UK.
Presumably the Irish Revenue is working under the same rules but you would only hear about this if, as an Irish tax resident, you had an account in another country. Of course, for those many people who set up accounts in Northern Ireland at one or other of the times when the euro looked more ropey than usual, these sort of letters are probably a fact of life.
The problem for Nationwide is that although it is a British business, it has an Irish-registered subsidiary, Nationwide UK (Ireland), and you, along with many other customers who received these letters, are customers of that bank.
