'Confirm where you are resident for tax purposes' letter has come through the post...

HappyCamper96 wrote: »

Thanks for the quick response.

I know I'm probably being an idiot here, but does this mean the letter is legitimate and that I SHOULD reply? And is it correct to use your National Insurance Number as a 'TIN'?

You can give your national insurance number or your UTR (HMRC's Unique Taxpayer Reference that you use on self assessment tax returns, if you do them). Both fit the bill for a taxpayer identifying number (TIN) in the UK. This should be explained in the definitions that come with the letter.

If you were USA resident or citizen your Social Security Number would be your TIN. If resident in France, your "numero fiscal de reference" or "numero SPI". In Guernsey or Canada, you would locally call it your Social Insurance number, SIN. Aussies have a Tax File Number or TFN. And so on.

Nearly all countries have tax ID numbers for individuals but they call them different things so Lloyds have simply captioned it using a generic term, because if they headed it up "National Insurance Number", a French resident might think he didn't have to fill it out because he didn't have one of those, when of course he does really have something equivalent.

The Common Reporting Standard is a legitimate set of regulations being introduced in over 100 countries - new bank customers in the last year will have already had to declare their tax residency but banks need to go back and fill in the gaps on their massive existing customer base to support ongoing reporting.

Below is the page on the OECD website where UK published its guidance to tell banks around the world that for UK people, NI numbers and UTRs were both valid types of TIN and where you would expect to find them:

https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs-implementation-and-assistance/tax-identification-numbers/