Path: utzoo!attcan!dptcdc!lsuc!sickkids!mark
From: mark@sickkids.UUCP (Mark Bartelt)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Bank obnoxiousness, tax woes
Message-ID: <145@sickkids.UUCP>
Date: 27 Mar 89 19:12:02 GMT
Reply-To: mark@sickkids.UUCP (Mark Bartelt)
Distribution: can
Organization: Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto
Lines: 44

As I sat down to begin fussing with my taxes last weekend, I discovered
that I never received T5 slips for several of my bank accounts.  I made
a few phone calls to try to find out why.  Here's what I learned:

Both Royal Bank and Toronto Dominion Bank have a policy of not sending
out a T5 for accounts which earned less than $100 in the previous year.
TD graciously offered to retrieve copies of my 1988 statements from the
"dungeon", as they called it (presumably some sort of archival storage),
but that it would take two to three weeks, and would cost three dollars
per statement: thirty-six bucks to get an interest report!

Royal Bank was worse:  They told me that the information simply was not
available.  Period.

In my own case, I actually know how much interest I earned, since I've
kept copies of all my old statements, except for the occasional ones
which never got delivered (thanks to Canada Post) and one can easily
figure out, given the statements which bracket a missing one, how much
interest was credited in months for which the statements are missing.
My calls were primarily to satisfy my curiosity about what would have
happened if I hadn't been quite so compulsive.

I wonder how many people find themselves in an intolerable situation:
Revenue Canada requires that you report all earned interest, but many
people never receive T5s for some of their accounts.  They may have no
easy way (or no way at all) of finding out how much interest they earned
in the previous year, unless they've kept their statements (and I wonder
how many people actually do).  Note that people are never told (to the
best of my knowledge, anyway) that they may never receive a T5, and that
it might be one's own responsibility to keep track of earned interest.

The really frustrating thing about this is that some computer, somewhere,
knows how much interest each of my accounts earned, since the decision
about whether to send me a T5 presumably isn't made by clerks with green
eyeshades and quill pens!  I don't object too strongly to the failure to
send a T5, but I am more than slightly annoyed by the fact that I can't
walk into my branch and find out a piece of information that one of their
computers certainly must know.

Comments?

Mark Bartelt                          UUCP: {utzoo,decvax}!sickkids!mark
Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto   BITNET: mark@sickkids.utoronto
416/598-6442                          INTERNET: mark@sickkids.toronto.edu