Barclays tax residency and citizenship information required.

[measles64]

Barclays have sent me a letter asking me to fill in a tax residency and citizenship form. WTH I have never even been to America. I am totally confused if I do not fill it in (not even had one) my accounts may be reportable to the relevant tax authorities. Doing a bit of googling it seems the IRS want to know.

how do you know it is anything to do with America?

FATCA. It's to comply with US tax concerns. It's primarily aimed at US citizens overseas or people who might have US investments, I think. Some bog standard customers of banks seem to be being caught up in it, though.

Is it genuine?
I had an email claiming to be from the IRS asking about my tax affairs ( not American, only ever been to Florida) and I assumed it was spam

I'd pop in to a branch and ask about it.

Various money laundering initiatives, and the response to clamour from the public to crack down on personal tax affairs, mean that this sort of thing is going to become the norm.

You can't open a bank account these days without providing this info, and it doesn't surprise me that there's a catch-up programme for other accounts.

I'd also assume that an email was a try-on spam, Hopping. If a financial institution tries to contact you about FATCA it should be in writing and by post I would have thought. (It's also the (eg) bank's responsibility to ensure compliance as fast as I'm aware and not a task of the IRS?)

My DD got a letter from our bank here in Australia asking for exactly the same information. She's not an American citizen (is UK and AU) but she does have a current ESTA.

I can only (probably quite wrongly) assume it's to do with that a small she's the only one in the family to have received this letter and the only one with a current ESTA.

We filled in the information on her online banking and haven't heard anything since.