Power of Attorney

These affairs can be quite complicated. You need to get proper advice as most bank staff are unlikely to know. I would suggest you find a solicitor who regularly works in this field. You could also try uk.legal

A word of warning though -throwing about phrases like discriminatory when English and Scottish law is very different is not likely to help your argument.

Neb

The whole thing's a nightmare! My wife and I have an (unregistered) POA for her 98-year-old father who now lives with us. You wouldn't believe the number of hoops we've had to jump through to open various accounts in his name, for us to operate under POA - especially when it comes to proof of identity for money laundering purposes because he of course doesn't have any utility bill showing *his* name and *this* address.

Each inststitution seems to have its own rules. Lloyds TSB was wonderful to deal with, NS&I and Sainsburys Bank were both a complete nighmare, and Coventry Building Society was somewhere in the middle - initially saying that we could only operate an account under POA if it *was* registered at the Court of Protection (but they later backed down on that).

Everything I've done has been in England, so I have no idea of ways in which Scotland may differ. [I think the English rules have changed, anyway, since we set up the POA three years ago.

This is probably not helping much! But the nub of it is that I suspect that each financial institution has a fair amount of freedom concerning what it will and won't accept. Your best bet may well be to use another bank - in which case make sure you get a definitive statement from them as to what is acceptable before you apply for the account.

I'm surprised. I found Sainsburys faultless for opening and operating a POA on-line account for elderly relative (but all addresses in England). And Sainsbury piggy-back off HBOS, same group as OP's Bank of Scotland.

Mine's entirely in England too. When did you do yours? I applied last August - and it took until October to get it going. Maybe things have improved since then.

At that time, the only way to apply for a POA account was to download a .pdf form, fill it in and send it off by post with all the supporting identity and POA documents. First off, the form was misleading in the way it presented the list(s) of acceptable ID documents. Then it required all of these to be less than 3 months old when some - such as Notices of Tax Coding etc. - are only issued annually. After a few phone calls to the Helpline, I resolved that lot and sent off all the paperwork. After about 4 weeks, I had heard nothing - so I rang the helpline again and spoke to some droid who insisted that the form which I had sent in was only for adding POA to an

*existing* account - not for opening a *new* account - despite the form itself saying explicity that it was for opening an account. Oh, and there was an option of sending an initial deposit with the application - which required the cheque to be annotaed with the number of the account which hadn't yet been opened! It took quite a few phone calls before I finally managed to speak to someone who knew what he was talking about, and chased up my paperwork and confirmed that the account had been opened.

When I tried to sign up for online access to the account, the only way which worked was to use my f-i-l's personal data and DOB etc. - it wouldn't work work with mine. So I had to pretend to be him - rather than myself under POA - which I could done from the outset, had I not wanted to do it properly. They did eventually give me my own logon so that I *can* now do it properly - but the whole thing took a couple of months from start to finish.

Apart from that, it was brilliant!

Hi Neb thanks for the advice, by discriminatory I was referring more along the lines of discriminating against accounts created and managed for the less mentally able people and not a north / south divide. For example the British Bankers Association (BoS are a member) produce guidance on opening accounts for mentally incapacitated people. So why don't BoS follow the guidelines and stop discriminating against mentally disadvantaged customers and recognise the PoE for what it stands for ?

Gio

Hi Roger, your comments are more or less the same as I encountered in the past and I know all about the agro over proof of identity :-)

We were having problems with institutions accepting the unregistered PoE and actually did not want to take all the control away from the donor but as her health deteriorated and the frequent problems we had we opted to register, so last Feb it was stamped. Barclays acted correctly as did the Abbey and Nationwide / Portman building societies but the Bank of Scotland / Halifax, they should know better given they are a UK bank.

I did have a definitive statement before I opened the account in the branch and their own web site says 'If you have PoE and would like to be able to manage your donors accounts on line or open new accounts....you will have to provide your PoE document and suitable ID.................."

It is because I have gone all through the agro of providing this that and the other that I am now so annoyed. If they had said sorry no can do I would have left it and looked else where.

Gio

Hi Martin, We have our own BoS and Sainsbury's a/c's so expected a rather smooth application but I kid you not, the process if involving a registered enduring PoE the process is anything but easy and it is not a branch problem.

Gio

Why not register the PoA and run the esisting ones?

That's what I did initially with my father-in-law's accounts - but most of them paid such derisory rates of interest that I wanted to do something better.

I see no point in paying a solicitor - it will still be him/her arguing with the bank; if they do not want you custom - (s)he will not be able to force them. I suggest that you escalate at the local branch of the Bank and if the Manager can't resolve the matter you tell them that you will take your money elsewhere and you will write a letter to the money section of one of the national papers in order to warn off other potential customers.

With Sainsburys? You are, of course, joking!

At one point when I vented my frustration at their lack of proper processes on the droid at the end of their helpline, I was met with the priceless response "You have to remember that you are dealing with a supermarket - not a *proper* bank"!!

Same here Roger, the donor had a low rate Nationwide a/c so to act in a proper manner to help protect the donors finances I opted for a double interest paying savings account while I examined what options were available. I would not have been acting in the donors best interest if I had left her money where it was.

Gio

Who mentioned Sainsbury's - the OP clearly said Bank of Scotland.

I did, initially - and others joined in. But it probably wasn't relevant to the bit of the thread to which you were replying - so apologies!