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Cahoot savings a/c - poor statement availability

Anybody out there still got one of these accounts? They were quite popular when they were introduced, due to a pretty generous interest rate. I've still got one.

When you got to the 'statements' page, there is a note about statements being available for a *maximum* of twelve months (my emphasis). If you want to keep them longer, you must save or print them, it says.

Now, obviously they must mean that they will keep them available for a

*minimum* of 12 months, even of it is also the maximum. Otherwise we'd need to be checking in every day to capture a potential statement before it vanishes. (Statement periods/dates have always seemed somewhat arbitrary, BTW)

So, I am perplexed to find that I can currently access just one statement covering 27/06/2007 to 26/07/2007.

I know that some interest was credited (with income tax deduction) shortly before 27/06/2007, and in any case within the last 12 months. Surely, therefore, I should be able to access a statement showing it.

Does anyone else have this problem?

My OH has, and when she queried it, they said it was because they didn't prepare statements if there were no transactions for a particular period (which there weren't, in her case). Apart from the fact that this excuse makes little practical sense for a purely Internet-operated account, I now suspect, in the light of my own circumstances, that this was a cynical piece of 'fobbing off'.

I've just done my tax return. I needed the interest details for 2006/07 tax year, and yet I can no longer access the interest details even for the

2007/08 (current) tax year. If interest-paying institutions are allowed to issue statements electronically, in a non-persistent manner, surely they must be bound by some HMRC rule that insists that they are kept accessible for a sensible time. Cahoot's 12 months is too short IMHO, but in my case they haven't even managed to satisfy that.
Reply to
Clifford Frisby
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At 15:16:11 on 19/01/2008, Clifford Frisby delighted uk.finance by announcing:

IIRC, you can request paper copy statements (for a fee).

Reply to
Alex

referring to the final part, are you sure?

I can see that they are entitled to charge for paper statements, but I would be very surprised if there were allowed to charge for a statutory entitlement.

tim

Reply to
tim (not at home)

Hi Currently I can access from 10th March 2007 to 9th Dec2007 with an interest entry on a statement covering the period 10th June 207 to 10th July

  1. Like you when the account is dormant nothing shows up in the statement list.

have you mailed their help line for advice or as a last effort, the cost of duplicate statements ?

Gio

Reply to
Gio

Just to say that my news server (Demon) has been snafu for over 24 hours in that it isn't serving up new articles (including, surprisingly, ones that I have posted myself through said server, although it is obviously handing them on to its peers!).

I can see some replies on google -- will reply as soon they appear on my server.

Reply to
Clifford Frisby

At 17:18:58 on 21/01/2008, tim (not at home) delighted uk.finance by announcing:

Their Ts&Cs on this are:

"5. Statements

5.1 Statements will be placed in the secure zone. Where a payment is required or charges are due, we will send you an email to tell you a statement is available to view. This will be at least 14 days before any charges are to be debited. 5.2 We recommend that you check your statements thoroughly and regularly. We recommend you print off a hard copy as a permanent record. If you wish to query any item on the statement please contact us immediately."

Their charge for a paper statement is £5.

Reply to
Alex

At 14:30:37 on 22/01/2008, Clifford Frisby delighted uk.finance by announcing:

Well the last time I used my account was in Feb 2007, and I have the one statement available for 2/2/07-1/3/07.

Reply to
Alex

The pedant in me says that 5.2 isn't even a term or a condition, but just a hint. Also, they probably mean 'frequently' rather than 'regularly'.

But the question is: how frequently is frequent enough?. In my case we are talking about a transaction which is barely six months old, for which I cannot access the relevant statement. I'll make a separate post showing that, based on what cahoot are now saying to me, you can miss statements regardless of how frequently you check.

Reply to
Clifford Frisby

Well, following iteration 2 of my dialogue with cahoot customer services, they have revealed the following two properties of their system for creating and expiring statements:

1) Individual statements are not produced for months where there are no transactions, but when a transaction does cause a statement to be produced, the start date of that statement will be deemed to be such as to make the statement contiguous with the previous statement.

(Fair enough. No problem. Unless you are not credited with any interest, or fail to check in for a whole year, you should not lose statements. However...)

2) Statements are removed from view 12 months after their *start* date, rather than their end date.

In case you think I'm misinterpreting them, here are their exact words, and no, *I* didn't remove the punctuation:

So, it seems that I had a window of opportunity of just one month in which to capture my statement. the other eleven months that I thought I had were swallowed up by the eleven months covered by the statement itself, during which it was, by definition, yet to be produced.

Is it just me, or is this a staggeringly inept piece of system design?

If I understand this correctly, the phenomenon of a statement expiring from view at just about the same time as it is produced, can be achieved with the wholly unremarkable case of someone who leaves his interest to compound year-on-year, without deposit or withdrawal. The statement would simply never appear online, despite it containing important information for tax purposes.

I'm struggling to understand how, unless this is a recent 'innovation', they have managed to sustain this system for any length of time.

They have offered to send a printed statement by post, which of course I will demand that they do at their own cost. I shall also be sending a letter to the Savings and Audit department of HMRC. (Cahoots system does not seem to me to come remotely close to ensuring that account holders can easily fulfill their obligations under Self Assessment, and I hate to think of people not paying the right amount of tax!)

Reply to
Clifford Frisby

At 15:52:07 on 22/01/2008, Clifford Frisby delighted uk.finance by announcing:

Er, no. It's a current account not a credit card. The transaction was

17th Feb.

What? I can see it. I just told you!

Reply to
Alex

Well, if my exposition (in another branch) of how their system operates is correct, then what you say makes sense, provided that you had a transaction in the previous month 2/1/07-1/2/07. However, you would need to have saved that statement to tell, because the start date of it (which seems to be what counts) is over a year ago now, which is presumably why you can't see it.

I think that if you had *not* had a transaction in 2/1/07-1/2/07, you would not now be able to see the statement ending 1/3/07, because its start date would have been further back.

But then you wouldn't be able to see any statements at all, and there might be another rule that prevents that situation occurring. It would be interesting to know what statements you can see in a couple of weeks' time, provided you don't have any transactions between now and then.

It all seems pretty daft to me.

Reply to
Clifford Frisby

Taxpayers are not expected to consult their bank statements in order to glean therefrom the information about interest earned and tax deducted, for their tax returns. Instead, banks generally (presumably because this is required by law) supply a certificate with just that information on it. This is entirely separate from normal bank statements.

Have you not received such a certificate? If not, ask them why not.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

Sorry I didn't make myself clear enough. They are obliged to offer a Tax Certificate to customers who request one. It is this that the OP actually needs to keep and this that I question their ability to charge for.

tim

Reply to
tim (not at home)

Banks have stopped sending them out to customers, unless they ask.

tim

>
Reply to
tim (not at home)

At 16:22:13 on 22/01/2008, Clifford Frisby delighted uk.finance by announcing:

Exactly!

Quite so.

Perhaps I'll leave it a few more months then transfer a penny in and out.

If you can wait that long ;-)

Reply to
Alex

I am talking purely about the 'savings' account. I don't think this weirdness applies to the credit card. (I've got the credit card and they seem to produce a statement each and every month even if there are no transactions.) I don't have the current account. From what you say it looks like there is some sort of statement period being accumulated up to when you next use the account, but whether the weirdness will be the same as for the savings account, I have little idea. It looks as though they might be.

But you said you could see *one* statement and that it covered

2/2/07-1/3/07.

I'm suggesting that you can no longer see the statement *prior* to that one, because *its* start date is over a year ago. I'm also suggesting that if you hadn't used the account in that *prior* month it would probably have had the bizarre knock-on effect of you not being able to see *any* statements.

If you haven't read my other post, with its fuller explanation, I recommend you do so, and I think you'll see what I mean.

It's certainly useful to know what you're seeing, though.

Reply to
Clifford Frisby

Hmm, now you've got me worried. Which of the two alternatives are you affirming???

RR, I remember fondly the sort of certificates you mean: a sort of P60 for an interest-bearing account, rather than an employment!

However, I have not received any such thing for quite a few years, despite having had several interest-bearing accounts in that time. I don't think there is any obligation for them to send them out as a matter of routine any more. I think we *are* expected, these days, in the normal course of things, to glean it from our statements.

If you tell me they have to send a certificate on demand, I will believe you though.

Reply to
Clifford Frisby

Just in case you are serious, be careful, because I think you will likely be unable ever to access the online statement which covers those transfers.

If you harbour anything like my obsessive traits about such things, you wouldn't want that to happen. And I wouldn't want it to happen to you :-)

If OTOH you taking the proverbial, I forgive you.

Just a minute, though. You are already nearly at the critical point. If you don't make a transaction on your account *before* 2/2/08, your next statement will never be visible to you, because it will extend over a year or more and will be 'expired' on or before it's end date, according to cahoot's bizarre algorithm.

Even if you make a transaction today, you will probably only get a 1-month window in which to print/save your next statement!

Reply to
Clifford Frisby

Sorry. Yes, it is a staggeringly inept piece of system design.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

Perhaps some have. But my banks still send them without my asking for them: RBS, HBOS, ING.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

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