Total fucking saga in Mega Bank today. I went in to give them my APRC details and make sure my credit card was okay for use abroad, and while I was doing that I asked to quickly confirm that my tax residency was correctly set as ZZ on their system, having spent an hour or so arguing about this in June-ish when I filled in the last CRS form while updating my details to the new ARC number. I showed the clerk a withholding certificate from Taishin correctly showing “ZZ” to help explain what I was talking about.
I thought she’d just be able to tell me what was appearing on her system, but this triggered about an hour of phone calls and conversations with multiple colleagues, until she finally printed out a piece of paper showing “GB” and subsequently another one where I’d apparently been classed by some reviewer in Mega Bank headquarters as having multiple tax residencies (the date in 2020 is when I originally opened the account):
The only country listed here appears to be Taiwan (I didn’t notice this at the time - it occurs to me now that this may be a workaround, i.e., choosing that option then only entering Taiwan instead of the other country), and she later said the “GB” was referring to my passport country and was independent of the CRS info (not what she told me originally). Anyway, I spent the next hour going off on a series of polite rants, which while somewhat enjoyable wasn’t really what I was hoping to do today.
I don’t have the energy to rehash the entire conversation here, but the gist of it was me showing them the OECD rules, Taiwanese regulations, and a letter from the tax bureau and asserting that they don’t have the right to change my self-certification after I’ve signed it (at least in the absence of contradictory information indicating other tax residency), most countries don’t tax based on citizenship, and I’ve been tax resident here for 7 years and haven’t been tax resident in the UK for 15 years. I pointed out the parts on their own CRS forms talking about tax residency not nationality, and she kept going back to her manager and other colleagues and coming back with the same answer: This can’t be changed once it’s set and their system doesn’t allow foreigners to have only Taiwan listed as their country of tax residency. (The first part seems obviously bullshit, because of course tax residency can change.)
At some point she let me fill out another CRS form. I asked what the point was if they were just going to ignore or overrule it again like the ones I did earlier this year and when opening the account. She assured me that this time that wouldn’t happen, so I filled it out entering only Taiwan and my APRC number (and striking out all the other empty lines in the table). After consulting with yet another colleague, she said they couldn’t accept that because foreigners aren’t allowed to be only tax resident in Taiwan.
I said at this point I’d be filing complaints with the FSC and MOI and asked her to clarify who I should be complaining about - their branch or Mega Bank headquarters. She confirmed it to be the latter, so I said I’d be doing that because their policy is wrong and discriminatory. She asked for the chance to look into it a bit more and e-mail me back, and I said fine because I’m going on vacation tomorrow anyway and probably won’t bother doing anything until I return. She also suggested the possibility of just registering my account as they would for a Taiwanese citizen, but she said she’d need to look into that (I assume the ID number format would throw up an error in their system anyway). A less helpful suggestion she gave was that I could just close my account.
Took two fucking hours, and I left the branch at 5:10 p.m. 