Newsgroups: can.general
Path: utzoo!lsuc!cs.ucla.edu!wales
Subject: Re: Bank obnoxiousness, tax woes
References: <145@sickkids.UUCP>
Sender: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales)
Distribution: can
Organization: UCLA CS Department, Los Angeles

In article <145@sickkids.UUCP>
sickkids!mark@uunet.UU.NET (Mark Bartelt) writes:

	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 . . . .  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.

For the sake of comparison, US tax law apparently requires banks, etc.
to issue 1099-INT forms (our equivalent of the T5) for any interest
totalling US$10 or more.

Also, my experience has been that US banks routinely show year-to-date
interest on each account's monthly statement -- and the first statement
of each year shows the total amount of interest earned during the pre-
vious year.  (At least, *my* bank -- Wells Fargo, descendant of the old
Wild West stagecoach company by the same name -- does this.)  So, even
if you don't save all your bank statements (!!), you still know how much
interest you earned as long as you get January's statement.

I save *all* my bank statements, BTW.  I thought everybody did. :-}

Out of curiosity . . . I wonder whether Mark ever inquired of either TD
or Royal Bank on those occasions when his statement was presumably lost
in the mail.  If I didn't get one of my bank statements, I would notify
the bank promptly and request/expect/demand a duplicate at no charge.

-- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683
   3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA
   wales@CS.UCLA.EDU      ...!(uunet,ucbvax,rutgers)!cs.ucla.edu!wales
"I couldn't read it because my parents forgot to pay the gravity bill."