Source of funds and source of wealth

GeoffTF

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81902541#Comment_81902541

That is only for tax records, and is not accurate even there. HMRC can go back further if they suspect carelessness or fraud. You may need to keep records for Capital Gains Tax purposes for much longer. HMRC may accept an estimate of the original cost of an asset, but you may end up paying more tax than you would do if you had proper records.

For AML it is more murky. You have to prove your innocence. Selftrade notoriously demanded lifetime accounting from all its customers in 2014, but eventually backed off. I had good records back to 2000, but had to use estimates before that. It is safest to keep your financial records indefinitely. That is not too difficult if they are in electronic form.

simonpies234

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81902805#Comment_81902805

Yep we established there is no defined limit on how far back they can go. Your postion puts you in about 0.0001% of the UK population though and my question was more directed at what others do.

simonpies234

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81902921#Comment_81902921

Yes HMRC can go back 20 years. But they won't demand records. Estimates would surfice.Records would certainly help. But if you was in a position of a 20 years tax investigation, which are reversed for the most serious cases. You would be using a tax accountant with exeperience of dealing with HMRC investigations.

dunstonh

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81902927#Comment_81902927

Am I not one of those others?

In this day and age of plentiful digital storage, scanned documents and downloaded pdfs, there is no reason to throw out records. i..e download a statement, view it and then drag into your statements folder.

It will pretty much gather virtual dust never to see virtual sunlight again but you never know.

masonic

It becomes more challenging if you have a lot of accounts. I have around 10 current accounts and 40 savings accounts, many of which are fixed term and regularly rotated. I have a complete ledger of all of my financial transactions in GNUCash and can account for every penny going back to ~2008, but I have not been so diligent in archiving bank statements, especially for savings accounts. I doubt my financial database would satisfy an external SOW request, so have started back-filling where I can. I am fortunate that most of my wealth has been built up in S&S ISAs and SIPPs, where I have much more complete records, so the hope is those, combined with payslips, would adequately demonstrate a pattern of regular contributions from earnings, and a significant contribution from investment returns over a couple of decades.

I have the added complexity of having jumped on the P2P lending bandwagon in the 2010s. Most of those firms no longer exist and the pattern of transactions is highly complex, but I do have annual tax statements showing the headline figures that I used to complete my tax returns.

If I were subjected to more invasive checks in the future, I'd have an expectation that the firm in question would need to be reasonable and if I couldn't provide them with exactly what they requested in the first instance, they'd endeavour to work with what I could provide. There will no doubt be situations where people will have lost documentation due to fire, computer malfunction, etc. and accommodations would need to be made to those individuals.

GeoffTF

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81903146#Comment_81903146

If all your cash movements are routed through one bank account, having perfect records for the savings accounts is of secondary importance. You can show that you paid in x and received that money back with interest. Some of the people here could have big problems if they do not have an excellent tracking system.

You could have satisfied Seltrade's demands if you had for each year of your life:

• Income
• Expenditure
• Asset valuations

They wanted to know how much money was being saved and what was the investment return. Evidence was not demanded. Alarm bells would ring if the claimed investment return was too high. Remember the rule of three for backups. One copy on your computer. One local backup. One remote backup (e.g. the cloud).

subjecttocontract

MMmmm.......I have no idea what I have in terms of documentation, I guess it would depend on what they ask for as to whether I could provide it. I'm not going to do anything more than what I already have. I've got far more important things to busy myself with and it doesnt include me spending any time on trying to best guess what might never happen.

LHW99

I do actually have payslips back to my first job, and a certain amount of periodic records of investments on paper / digital, but I don't have bank statements for more than about 6 years, so it would depend what was needed. Hopefully that would be spelled out to some extent.

boingy

Does anyone think that these things significantly reduce fraud and money laundering?

subjecttocontract

Yes, it has as much affect on money laundering as the first day of Spring has on the weather !