Assuming you mean a complaint to the FSC about E.SUN, you can also just send it as a PDF attachment and write a simple cover letter in the message box telling them to check the attachment for the full complaint. I’ve done that before.
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Why does this guy need so many bank accounts? Honest question.
Guy
HSBC was absolutely smooth for me (Taipei branch). I only provided my ARC number, not my Italian TIN.
Since it may matter: my Taiwanese wife was there and it was a Premier account
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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Taking action against Taiwan’s definition of domicile/residence relating to foreigners
I need to do that. I just spent an hour at the tax house this morning getting reimbursed for the 20% withholding HSBC slapped on my CD’s
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Good luck with that. 
Are you actually wholly tax-resident here though? Don’t know what your situation is between here and Japan, and whether you’re married to a Taiwanese citizen (so wouldn’t need to be physically present so long each year to be regarded as resident, AFAIK).
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Taiwan tax resident.
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They actually told us to invest from my wife’s account so to avoid this weird foreigner tax
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ofc, we foreigners just an annoyance, fuck them. My money, my name.
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Yes, he’s just arrived in Taiwan. Approximately 3 weeks ago.
He has a standard HSBC account at home (not Premier or Advance). The good news is that compared to the reviews of the HSBC Hsinchu branch on Google Maps, he had a positive experience. We went for an initial appointment last week where the employee took copies of his documents and scheduled an appointment for yesterday to complete account opening. He told me that compared to E.SUN and CTBC, the account opening process was a walk in the park. He told HSBC about the CRS/FATCA issues he had at E.SUN and HSBC said, we trust you to complete the form as per what you believe is correct for your situation. So he could tick option 1 where he’s a tax resident of Taiwan only. 
Makes me want to open an account with HSBC but I’ve got enough to deal with for now.
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beautiful, you got a good teller!
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No, it’s the first step of complaining to E.SUN Bank as per the FOI guidelines which Mataiou confirmed.
My friend has finally got his ducks in a row and submitted the complaint to E.SUN Bank yesterday (26th June 2024) with myself BCC’ed via two of their whistleblowing email addresses. As per their definition on their whistleblowing page, two employees did something against their policy. The 30 day clock is on.
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E.Sun Bank Toufen update:
Two days after the complaint, the bank sent an email with the initial part in English and the main body in Mandarin as well as a PDF copy of their response to avoid any discrepancy. Their reasoning was:
As the response involves legal provisions, we are replying in Chinese to preserve the original intent as follows.
The bank also called him to confirm if he received their email and that the two employees whose names were in the complaint would be dealing with his case when he goes to the branch to update his CRS form.
The bank said that they needed justification as to why he could select that he’s a Taiwan tax resident only. As my friend is a UK citizen, he went on the relevant UK government website where you can go through a set of questions to determine your tax status. He did this in front of them and provided a screenshot of the final page which says that based on what he filled in, he’s not a tax resident of the UK, therefore he’s a tax resident of the country he’s in (i.e. Taiwan). They were satisfied with this and finally let him complete the form correctly based on his tax situation.
It’s possible to update your tax status with Taiwanese banks but you need to spend/waste a lot of time justifying your tax status as they most probably don’t want to be fined for any mistakes from the FSC.
Whereas if you read the previous comments, HSBC is a walk in the park and they trust you to correctly state your tax status.
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Maybe a British bank understands whether or not people are tax residents of the country they live in. HSBC HK never listed me as tax resident in HK either, just Taiwan.
This is annoying! Fubon never paid me the measly NT$100 reward (
) they were supposed to pay me for opening a bank account with them and setting up automatic deductions of my credit card bill for six months. 
Obviously it’s just NT$100 so it wouldn’t be remotely worth my time complaining about, spending almost the same as that on a phone call or going into the branch. Obviously. So I guess I’ll need to do that at some point. 
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Just for posterity and to clear up some misinformation in this thread (from me), Taiwan should be “TW”, not “ZZ”:
Kind of obvious when you think about it. 
Some others previously called it, in fact:
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I was feeling argumentative on Tuesday and wanted to inject some chaos into the universe. Since I had to go to Huanan to collect a new credit card anyway, I decided to turn it into a tedious day out and go ask Mega Bank and Taishin to update my tax residency details, using my certificate of residence for 2020–2024 from the tax office and my entry/exit records from MyData. This is what happened.
Mega Bank
This was a continuation of me complaining at them in the branch last November and them subsequently issuing a withholding statement for 2023 marking me as resident, having stayed >183 days, and with the tax jurisdiction code box left blank:
It took maybe 90 minutes and a lot of phone calls between the branch staff and some other department, but based on my certificate of residence, entry/exit records, and APRC, they seem to have agreed to list me as resident for this year and future years, with a withholding rate of 10% rather than 20% in perpetuity (let’s see if that actually happens).
The more senior lady with decent English brought over to deal with it told me that because I have an APRC they can now list me as resident every year. I’m pretty sure that’s incorrect and not what they’re supposed to do, but given that this is the outcome I wanted anyway I didn’t feel it was my job to correct them.
As an irritating side story, I had to fill out the CRS form again, making it my fourth time with Mega Bank. For anyone unfamiliar with these but nonetheless still bothering to read this boring thread, this is how they’re typically laid out (paraphrased):
Q1. Please choose one of the following statements:
I am only tax-resident in Taiwan.
I am also tax-resident in other countries/jurisdictions.
Q2. If you indicated you are tax-resident in other countries in Q1, please complete the following table listing each country where you are tax-resident along with your corresponding TIN for that country.
If a TIN is unavailable, please choose the most appropriate reason among A, B, or C:
Reason A: The country/jurisdiction where the account holder is tax-resident does not issue TINs to its residents.
Reason B: The account holder is unable to obtain a TIN. If you select this reason, please explain why the account holder is unable to obtain a TIN.
Reason C: A TIN is not required. Only select this reason if the domestic law of the relevant country/jurisdiction of the account holder’s tax residence does not require the collection of TINs.
| Country/jurisdiction of tax residence | Tax identification number (TIN) | If no TIN is available enter reason A, B, or C | If reason B, explain why the account holder cannot obtain a TIN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blah | Blah | Blah | Blah |
| Blah | Blah | Blah | Blah |
| Blah | Blah | Blah | Blah |
Some banks, like Mega Bank, skip Q1 and just go straight to the table for listing the countries/jurisdictions of tax residency. I suspect this might be different on the Chinese-language forms, as it is with Huanan, but on the English form there’s no option for declaring you’re only tax-resident in Taiwan — the assumption here seems to be that if you’re filling in the English form you must be tax-resident somewhere else too.
In any case, as usual I just entered “Taiwan” and my APRC number in the table and crossed out the following rows for good measure. The lady was fine with this but then offhandedly explained to me that I didn’t need to do anything else because I’d chosen reason C so didn’t need to supply a TIN for the UK.
Now, because of the weird pagination of Mega Bank’s CRS form, the description of reason C above coincidentally happens to appear at the start of the third page, directly above the table where you list the countries. She’d apparently understood this as meaning that anything filled in on the table belongs to reason C and that’s why I don’t need to provide the TIN for the UK, a country I’m not tax-resident in.
I told her (politely, I think) that she was wrong about this and that’s not why I don’t need to enter a TIN — why don’t they ever read their own bloody forms?! She insisted that it was, that she deals with these forms every day and knows what she’s doing, and got in a huff with me.
I didn’t see her again after this, and she just left me to be dealt with for the final steps by the younger guy whose counter it was but who didn’t speak much English and seemed less experienced with the forms. I asked him to thank her for her help when I left. 
Taishin/Richart
This was a continuation of me complaining at them in the branch… oh, I don’t know now — also last November I think. I was told by the staff member that she needed to check some aspects of my complaint and Taishin would contact me, but they never bothered getting back to me.
I sent them a follow-up e-mail in August, complaining about how they were still sending me incorrect withholding certificates, how they’d never gotten back to me, and why they asked four times where I’m tax-resident when I opened the account and still ignored my answers. I also attached copies of my certificate of residence and entry/exit records.
Taishin called me back a couple of days later. I first spent a ridiculous amount of time explaining to them that citizenship/nationality isn’t the same as tax residency, and after a lot of back-and-forth they agreed I could go into a branch with my entry/exit records after I’ve spent 183 days in Taiwan each year to get them to change the withholding statements for that year.
That’s what I finally did on Tuesday. After showing them the certificate of residence and entry/exit record, they agreed they’d tick the “has the account holder spent 183 days in Taiwan this year?” box and change the withholding rate to 10%.
They refused to stop putting “GB” in the “tax jurisdiction code” box, despite me repeatedly explaining that I don’t have tax residency in the UK. They also said they wouldn’t be ticking the “residency” box because I’m a foreigner — it looks to me that they’re interpreting the “domicile”/“住所” in this box (Chinese: “國內有無住所”) as meaning household registration, in the same way that the tax office has been doing. I argued a bit about both of those things, but his manager stuck to her guns.
At the end, I did also show them the withholding certificate from Mega Bank listing my residency as “yes” and without “GB”, which seemed to make them unsure about their position. He asked to take a copy of that and said they’d call me back. I’m thinking to write to the tax office to ask for clarification about how those two boxes should be completed for foreigners, especially those with an APRC and having stayed for >183 days in the current year.
The young Taishin guy I was dealing with was alright though. When I went to his counter, he said something like “Oh, it’s you. You complained about this before right?” 
(He wasn’t even the one dealing with me last time — it was a couple of the female staff, so they must have been gossiping about the annoying foreigner.)
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I wrote to the Taipei tax office after this. They just called me back and said the following:
(1) It’s okay for foreigners to have the “Residency” question answered “yes”, if they’re really resident with an address here. The lady agreed it should be “yes” in my case.
(2) It’s okay for foreigners to have the “Tax Jurisdiction Code” question answered “TW” because it’s indeed asking about tax residency not citizenship. The lady agreed it should be “TW” in my case.
(3) If banks aren’t filling these out right, we’re welcome to ask them to call the tax office to clarify.
I asked her to send a copy of this in writing. 
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Please share with us if u ever really get that
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Yes, of course. 
(Hopefully they don’t change their mind before committing it to writing. )
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