Received a letter, Money Laundering laws?

inmypocketnottheirs

Iamthesmartestmanalive wrote: »

C

as for inpocket- talk about paranoia

Im sure the banks love spending millions of pounds complying with the legislation:rolleyes:

To some maybe, to others awareness.

Or maybe banks prefer us not to have cash (i.e. Barclays Oystercard) so that all our money is safely locked up in their vaults.

olly300

inmypocketnottheirs wrote: »

To some maybe, to others awareness.

Or maybe banks prefer us not to have cash (i.e. Barclays Oystercard) so that all our money is safely locked up in their vaults.

It is not awareness. Why would any business want to implement regulation that cost them money out of their profits?

The goverment in this country makes laws which costs people and businesses their own money to implement.

Banks would prefer us not to have cash. In fact lots of businesses would prefer not to have cash payments as it's more hassle for them to deal with. Electronic transactions are easier to deal with.

jamesd

Careful, you'll have people thinking that the bank is hassling her to try to discourage her from using the cash the banks don't want to deal with.

This is a customer service failure, no more or less. The communication from the bank should have been clear and obvious and not prompted the reaction that it was rude.

Talk of organised crime is irrelevant: that does not control the way the banks choose to communicate when complying with the regulations and it's irrelevant in this case because there indications are that no money laundering is involved.

As a matter of policy, I've no objection to increasing the costs banks face when complying with the money laundering regulations when they do so badly, as appears to be the case here. Let the market reward those who do it well and punish those who do it badly, as with all other customer service matters.

spinningsheep

All this talk of a police state and whats it got to do with them how I get my money etc etc, well personally I welcome the safeguards. I doubt you would be quite as willing to allow huge cash deposits,no questions asked if someone had used your account to pay in dodgy money, no questions asked. At the end of the day, its not a huge hassle to reply to the justified questions, and if you dont like the way the banks do business you have 4 options:

1) just get on with it and keep quiet
2)keep all your money under the mattress and opt of banks altogether
3)bank offshore with a non UK bank
4)emigrate!

inmypocketnottheirs

I'll go for 2,3 and 4 then.

At last a useful suggestion!

spinningsheep

haha, glad to be of assistance

jamesd

spinningsheep, there are other options. All customer communication is a customer service issue; this bank seems to have a systematic problem if this is their standard approach and all customers get the communication that seemed rude.

Beyond that there's the question of efficiency of regulation and implementation. What are your own views on:

What percentage of customers would you like to see receive rude letters per customer found to have been not paying enough income tax?

Now go one step further back, where the customer is acting perfectly legally in all respects, no tax dodging or other law-breaking at all, ever in their life. Customer gets a letter like this. What percentage of cases like this would you like to see result in detection of someone paying enough tax when it's not the customer of this bank at all who is possibly doing something wrong? 10 innocent customers asked per person paying them money that hasn't had full tax paid on it? 100 innocent customers? What's your own threshold for efficiency and reasonableness?

Then it's possible to compare the actual rates to see whether the measures are delivering reasonable success for the costs they are imposing on those innocent of any wrongdoing.