Strange activity on my Fidelity account

Lomcevak

dunroving wrote: »

See, posts like this make me think they are BS'ing me ... nothing they have told me so far makes sense

My Fidelity SIPP is fairly straightforward, but looking through the transactions I can't see any sign that they do anything other than apply tax relief pro rata based on the original transaction(s). The only thing I've not done is a single, one-time transaction to a new fund - my ad hoc lump sums go to the same set of funds as my routine monthly payment - but I can't see any suggestion that this would be treated differently.

Looks more likely to me as if something glitched, and customer services are trying to invent reasons to explain it. When I first set mine up I had an issue that baffled the telephone helpdesk but managed to escalate it to someone higher up who was very helpful sorting it - have you tried this approach? I didn't need to threaten to complain, but if you make no progress that might be an avenue.

dunroving

Another update - I have just returned form my trip to the US and called Fidelity immediately to follow up on this. The person I spoke with was able to pull up the record of my previous calls and the updates are:

The tech team tried unsuccessfully to "tea leaf" my account activity to trace whether I authorised this pattern of top-ups (i.e., any new cash to go 100% into whatever happens to be my most recent fund investment).

The issue has been passed on to the Pensions Team to look further into the situation.

While I was on the call, I gave instructions to sell the shares that were purchased on 22/4 and put into my SIPP cash account. [I did this to demonstrate that I tried to reverse the transaction at the earliest possible opportunity, reinforcing my position that I had no desire to invest all top-up HMRC cash in a volatile UK biotech fund prior to a potentially turbulent time surrounding and following the UK election). It looks like I will have lost £300 in about a week.

I then asked him "If an account holder wanted to see online what was their current default top-up strategy, where would they go?" [I asked because it seems there is no way to see this - and the documents sent following all of my SIPP investments say nothing about a change in top-up investment strategy]. He led me through a labyrinthine mock fund investment, at the end of which I was on the basic SIPP information page. So then he led me through a labyrinthine mock fund switch strategy which took me to a page that had no "Continue" button. In other words, (a) to check your current default top-up strategy you have to pretend you want to either make a new investment or switch investments, and (b) it doesn't even work! I have had problems with the functionality of the Fidelity pages before and I was glad it happened while one of their reps was talking me through how to do it.

It's a bloody shambles.