The Guardian reports this morning that:
Banks and building societies are to carry out immigration checks on 70m current accounts from January in the biggest extension of Theresa May's plans to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants in Britain, the Guardian has learned.
The Home Office expects to identify 6,000 visa overstayers, failed asylum seekers and foreign national offenders facing deportation in the first year of the checks, which are to be carried out quarterly.
To be candid, I can think of few bigger wastes of resource than this.
I also think this a massive indication of the inappropriate priorities of this government. I have for years argued that the bank accounts of limited companies should be subject to much higher degrees of scrutiny and reporting to ensure that every company trading in the UK is identified and has its turnover and beneficial owners reported by the bank(s) supplying services to it to HMRC and Companies House, without any success at all.
The aim of my proposal is obvious: I believe that this would significantly reduce the tax gap at benefit to us all, including all honest businesses. But that has not happened. There maybe several hundred thousand such accounts with illegal income stashed in them in the UK at any time.
But hunt for 6,000 illegal immigrants in a haystack and off the government sets the banking world going. That's an error of judgement on a scale that is hard to forgive.
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Yep HSBC asking for my wife’s passport number. Already.
This is so petty. There are as you say much more pressing priorities.
Rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic – in steerage – and putting drawing pins on them for spite.
We are of course relying on Home Office statistics – the people who are not averse to threatening EU citizens legitimately living in the UK with deportation.
Even if that number is right, 6,000 people in the UK is roughly one in 10,000 – that is, one person on 150 full double decker buses. Or we could play the stupid tabloid game of saying it is “equivalent to a town the size of” … er. … Godmanchester. If they were all in the same place.
This sort of thing hints that we are moving further towards a surveillance state, where people will have to prove their right to public services. Do not be surprised if someone suggests a need for identity cards to make this sort of thing easier, and to assist with countering terrorism and people trafficking and healthcare tourism and any other bogeyman they can conjure up.
A peripheral consequence of bank ” ringfencing” which is to become UK) law sometime next hear barring a successful repressentation to the High/Supreme Courts that it should not do so .
Ostensibly the UK version of the reinstigation of the Taft Hatley Act ( US) forbidding banks to play fast and loose with retail ( and corporate) client money unless specifically authorised by account signatory(ies)
Would not even have appeared on the radar had Mifid II not been promulgated as a consequence of the 2007/8 global financial horlicks.
You are right on the company issue Richard, hopefully it will be tackled at some point. I am a signatory on an executor account at Nat West which I expect to close shortly. They are not my favourite bank. I have been winding them up by refusing to complete their tax residence form. I just write on it “UK resident all my life”, 3 times so far. Interesting to see how far these stupid bureaucratic requirements can be pushed.
I can see why the banks go along with this, the UK Gov and the banks are so closely allied in the Financial Brit Empire and its influence around the world. The UK as a state has vastly diminishing influence but its financial tentacles give it clout.
That’s why the UK was so opposed at every turn to have the EU bring transparency to financial dealings and it seems to me to be why so many Brexiters in power were keen to get out of the EU.
This article is an eye opener: https://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2017/09/18/city-london-capital-invisible-empire/