I act as treasurer for a club run by my wife, it is a group of mostly retired ladies who meet fortnightly for craft and social gatherings, the club has been meeting for 22 years and in that time has always banked with the same high street bank, their annual turnover is just over a thousand pounds. A couple of weeks ago I received a six page form to fill in asking stupid questions such as how much overseas trade we carry out and other equally ridiculous questions. The form also required all the present signatories to the account to provide evidence of identity which needed to be countersigned by a solicitor, evidence of identity was listed as passport or driving licence, how many retired people in their seventies and eighties still have valid driving licences or passports. All the signatories to the account had already proved their identities when they were initially appointed. The purpose of the form was to identify and tackle money laundering, my thoughts on this subject are why are the banks harassing retired persons clubs when they are daily handling millions of pounds of dirty money from the city of London. The form threatened that failure to comply with the requirements of the form would affect the continuation of the bank account, I filled in the areas of the form that I considered reasonable and left the rest blank, if they close the account then the club will resort to a tin box under the bed for holding any monies. It seems that banks are becoming more and more obstructive to ordinary customers. Dave W

At least the bank isn't asking you to pay to give them this information. If you were a registered society, you'd have to send a return every year to the FCA telling them exactly the same info as last year, in fact when it was a paper form I used to photocopy the previous year's and change the date. For this we had to cough up I think £55 and send the form to that nice cheap office accommodation in Canary Wharf. It might all have changed for the better since I resigned as hon sec, but I doubt it. It's all done on line nowadays, so copying it won't work, I wonder how they would react if you just answered 'same as last year'

We never had this problem when we were in the EU.

:O)

While working as a standalone limited liability consultant for a few years (after retiring) I had to provide much of the above information on an annual basis despite my claims that nothing had changed from the previous years. The question that tickled me was the request for an organogram of the organisation for which I supplied a picture of yours truly with my job title (I think I was the director). In the end HSBC got too difficult about the US regulatory risk of banking my tiddly company and I became properly retired.

Before anyone says, "Ah but you need two directors for a company!" My company was registered in the Seychelles.

My Professor at University had a consulting company in the UK. His company was similarly small and so to fulfill the requirement for a second director he made his wife one. He said the requirement for the directors to meet at least once a year was generally performed in the bath with a bottle of wine.

My condolences to all the treasurers.

Correction, this is not a requirement.

Robert Butler

?????

Robert Butler

I wonder what the designers of the bumph would say if you simply wrote "N/A" against incomprehensible questions, then if challenged tell them it is incomprehensible to the sole-trader so obviously applies only to very large companies with £umpteen-M turnovers and many institutional shareholders.

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When my previously-State owned employer was sold off the new entity gave us employees each a block of shares with an option to buy more. The allegedly-explanatory booklet was obviously written by stock-brokers for stock-brokers, so I gave up on Page One, and ever since simply welcome the modest little nest-egg (tax-paid) my holding returns each year.

Money sums should be simple, but it is too easy and profitable for the very-numerate semi-illiterates who run the money-trade to make finances as complicated as possible, even impossible for we outsiders to understand..

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One of the best rejoinders I have read, to bureaucrats trying to bully anyone with jargon, was from an American whose child brought home a letter copied to all parents. It excitedly described in florid, pseudo-intellectual twaddle, some new educational policy in that school.

The father wrote back, giving his c.v. as a professional linguist fluent in about 3 European languages and with some knowledge of others, but –

"… I have no idea what you are talking about. Have you?"

A teacher I knew said he was bombarded with questionnaires for no clear purpose from County Hall. Eventually he simply ignored any form of no obvious help or benefit to his work.

He said he threw away number of papers no-one had pestered him to answer – if they'd not done so they can't have been important in the first place.

I have just completed a gov.uk NHS Covid test result. A bit long-winded but very simple. I reckon the NHS (and other Government agencies) could make a mint training commercial software designers to create products that suit all we users having the temerity not to have a PhD in computing!