CH232200 - How to do a compliance check: information powers: financial institution notices: information and documents

You should not issue a notice if the information and the documents requested are in your reasonable opinion of a kind that would be onerous for the Financial Institution to provide or produce.

A FIN can only be issued to a specific legal entity, such as the company that is the Financial Institution that operates the relevant account. For example, if ‘AnyTown Bank’ is a brand name of ‘AnyBorough Banking Plc’ then a FIN would need to be issued to ‘AnyBorough Banking Plc’ in order to be valid.

If you require information and documents that are related to accounts in different legal entities of the Financial Institution, you will need to issue a separate notice to each legal entity.

If you have any concerns about what you can request from a Financial Institution, in the context of your case, see CH232300 and discuss with an authorised officer.

Making your request

Notices to Financial Institutions about their customers should generally ask for documents rather than information.

Notices should usually only specify documents:

  • available to the Financial Institution’s customer, or
  • files held about the customer such as ‘Know Your Customer’ information. This will include copies of documents provided to the Financial Institution by the customer

The authorised officer could, for example, approve production of the following documents normally available to the Financial Institution’s customer, such as:

Records of

  • bank accounts
  • deposit receipts
  • standing orders
  • securities, valuables, and so on, held for the customer (either in safe keeping or as nominee)
  • accounts held by the same legal entity
  • debit and credit cards issued
  • safe deposits
  • the purchase and sale of shares
  • insurance transactions carried out on the customer’s behalf
  • details of loans arranged
  • creation of trusts or offshore arrangements on the customer’s behalf (This will relate to documents on the creation of these trusts and arrangements that the Financial Institution has access to. Where the trusts or other entities hold their own documents that are not in the possession of the Financial Institution, you will have to issue a separate information request to that entity).

Further Information

Financial Institutions may hold information that will be reasonably required by HMRC. For example, they may hold information on accounts held in other financial institutions. If you consider that the Financial Institution has information on a bank account held by another financial institution, then you may request the details if this is reasonably required.

Your notice should only include requests for documents that relate to the tax periods, duty accounting periods or duty points you are checking. You may need to be flexible on the dates you are checking. For example, where you want to check documents from a tax year (6 April to 5 April in the following year) the Financial Institution may only have the documents to the end of the month so you could accept 1 April to 31 March of the following year (or 30 April if you want to review transactions in the final days of the tax year).