In my case… the banks want to pretend that I don’t have an extra nationality and try to push me to write my country of birth as my country of citizenship telling me “it won’t matter.”
“If it doesn’t matter so much… then why do I have to fill it out?” I tell them.
Something that has worked so far for me at Taihsin and Megabank is to go to a branch that uses paper forms, and then to “amend” the form in any way I see fit, striking stuff out, or writing what I want. Then I sign that. So far that has always gone through.
How do you define “worked”? Did they just accept the form, then ignore your changes and enter into the system that you’re tax resident in your passport country anyway?
You might be able to see on your tax withholding certificates from Taishin. They send them to me every month.
The Mega Bank clerk also suggested to me that I could just write something extra on the incorrect form, and it took quite a while to convince them that I wouldn’t be doing that.
Yeah true, though that’s about whether they’re a U.S. citizen/resident rather than whether they have multiple nationalities per se.
I’m also not sure how rigorously Taiwanese banks are checking that for every Taiwanese customer that walks through the door wanting to open an account. I suspect it might be something of a don’t ask don’t tell policy in many cases (though I guess there’s also a check box on the account-opening forms these days), which is pretty much the opposite of foreigners being assumed to have tax residence in their passport country, being made to sign false self-certifications, or having to argue for ages to avoid those things.
Yeah, I have that problem, but legally I look at that as the bank’s problem.
It “worked” for me in that I was not required to sign or make a false statement.
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. 
Or just leave it open with $0 in the account… (banks hate it when you do this.)
It seems by design to list foreigners as having overseas tax residency so that they can show a big list to the Taiwan government that they are CRS compliant, while causing a huge mess for foreigners with their home tax regions.
This possibility has occurred to me more than once as well… I wonder if their proof of CRS compliance is just a long list of poorly anonymized foreign names that don’t fit into the name column.
If 3+ foreigners all show up at one bank branch to complain about incorrect CRS, I wonder if that would take up all the teller windows and put the branch grinding to a halt for the day, unable to process any other customers. Probably the issue would be escalated to the branch 經理.
Now there’s an interesting idea… 
Would probably end up in the news, too. (For better or worse.)
LOL Maybe we should organise an event and have at least 20 foreigners all at once? @fifieldt what do you think? haha
We could call the media and have them waiting lol
Hey have you still not received any further reply from them about this?
Haven’t unfortunately, they are still “reviewing” on how to reply
Proving compliance by being totally non-compliant. sounds very Taiwanese
I think it’s probably worth doing, but needs to be carefully structured.
What’s the ideal outcome?
Make noise and be as messy as possible
Maybe raise awareness their implementation of CRS is wrong? Some higher ups screwed up the implementation. Ideal outcome is policy change.
Withdrawal from CRS 
