Hello, I have not gotten anywhere with Co-Ops for months. I am very concerned Monzo’s inability to provide legal documents could land me in jail. I need to report this information in 4 days
I am having issues getting the types of tax documents I need in order to file my taxes with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. I am also subject to FACTA reporting.
I require a few things so far which the chat reps either do not understand, or appear unable to provide.
Individual monthly tax statements for each savings pot, both open and closed, held by me for the 2019 calendar year.
The US tax year is calendar, therefore I need to be able to reconcile the difference between the US and UK’s tax years. I have also been informed by chat support each savings pot is in my name and is a relationship between myself and the savings bank. Monzo is not holding the funds on my behalf with the savings institution. Therefore, I need to report each savings pot separately to the IRS (1099-INT) and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FACTA) for my mandated FBAR
The highest balance held with Monzo directly for 2019 by myself for all accounts individually
FACTA reporting requires me to report the highest balance held in each of my accounts. I therefore need to know what the highest balance was during the 2019 calendar year for each of my accounts for any one moment. This is not something that is easy to discern from the statements Monzo provides as they lack a running balance.
For my current account this needs to be the largest balance held with Monzo during 2019 including all non interest baring pots.
For my savings pots this needs to be the highest balance held in each pot during the 2019 calendar year.
Monzo is only able to provide me a consolidated “Tax Statement” for all pots combined. If what Monzo tells me is true, that all Savings Pots are held in my name, between myself and the savings institution, not held by Monzo on my behalf, then I do need to report these as separate accounts. I am unable to obtain this information in-app. The same goes for closed savings pots, which were open during the 2019 calendar year.
As a bank which operates in the US, they are required by US law to report this information to the IRS on any US citizens worldwide. Therefore they should already keep this information to hand.
You don’t need individual monthly tax statements, you just need a statement showing all interest on each savings pot for the calendar year 2019. Monzo COps can provide this. In fact, they can provide savings pot statements for calendar year 2019 showing all transactions on a savings pot. This will also meet your second requirement of seeing what the highest balance is on each savings pot.
You are also not going to ‘land in jail’. In the worst case for not splitting out interest, you would be fined, but I doubt even that.
This would be great, but Savings Pots statements do not show interest unfortunately. Monzo has only provided me statements which are April to April combining all savings pots from multiple
savings banks.
I would be shocked if Monzo hadn’t the ability to provide such information, while accepting customers with US tax obligations. I can’t believe your the only one who needs this, and that Monso would risk that group of customer being fined
I’m not sure posting is going to get you an answer quicker than going through COps…
… if the service here has been that bad, then you should raise a complaint to help push Monzo to improve this process. I’d imagine there are a lot of US Citizens in a similar position so would be surprised (like everyone else) if this is a manual process.
I received a statement from Monzo that itemised each credit and debit from my savings pot. Granted, it doesn’t specifically note which credits are interest, but I could figure that out by eliminating all the other credits/debits which match up to corresponding ones on my main transaction feed. I only have one savings pot, but the statement I got shows the name of the savings pot in the ‘description’ field, so I imagine with multiple pots on the same statement, they would show the other pot names and it would be possible to figure out which pot a transaction applies to. And they generated a statement that ran from when the pot opened until the date I requested it, so it’s easy to see which transactions fall within calendar year 2019.
Now, I am not at all claiming that this shouldn’t be improved. I already fed back to COps that the ‘description’ should say what the item was for (e.g. deposit/withdrawal/interest/etc.). And needing to manually request it is a pain. The whole thing is clearly not thought through and a bit of a bodge. It could do with significant improvement so we can get proper statements, easily, for our savings pots.
However, for the purposes of tax reporting, it’s possible to get the information you need. If it helps, this is what I asked in the chat that got me the statement:
Hi «name of COp», thanks for the information, but I already know about generating the tax year interest statements from the app. However, what I need is a ‘proper’ statement for my easy access savings pot that shows each time interest was added to the pot, the date it was added, and the amount. All I can find in the app is aggregate information showing total interest earned over a period, but nothing that shows exactly what interest was credited to the pot on which days.
Monzo has told me in chat, they do not hold any information beyond April of last year as they only keep the most recent UK tax year. I find this incredibly hard to believe as it would be a violation of UK law to not hold information for more than 1 tax year.
The tax statements I was provided only included deposits and withdrawals.I did not see any indication of interest deposited in those statements.
A GDPR SAR could probably give you the raw data? Even on my closed account I can still see the transactions done on my first prepaid card back in early 2017 so I’d be very surprised if they were intentionally deleting data older than last year.
I’m massively late to this party but I’ve recently updated the way we generate Savings Pot statements
They now include (Interest Payout) next to any payment which was, well, an interest payout
This project took me a little while to build & get reviewed / signed off but it was super fun to work on this & roll it out to the team
It seems to have made lots of folks happier than statements without the interest breakdown we can also generate these with customised date ranges now which should make life even easier if you only need a calendar year or the past 3 months, etc.
but I’ve recently updated the way we generate Savings Pot statements 
we can also generate these with customised date ranges now 
which should make life even easier if you only need a calendar year or the past 3 months, etc. 
