Can you help us find lost charity bank account?
I AM the assistant secretary of a masonic lodge. Some years ago, one of our members opened an account at Woolwich in Eltham, Kent. This may have been in his name and ‘care of’ the charity. There would have been two or three signatories.
He passed away a few years ago, and we cannot find the savings account book, although we know it existed because we saw it previously. Could you please help us to find this money?
B. M., Kent. Well, you didn’t give us much to go on — but I am happy to tell you that the money has been found. This is primarily due to some brilliant detective work involving ingenious thinking and hard digging by one man at Barclays bank, which took over the Woolwich brand in 2000.
Most of the information you provided the branch was — shall we say — not quite accurate. For example, the names were spelled differently.
But there were clues, so the Barclays code-breaker searched throughout Kent and played around with the spellings. eventually, the money was tracked down. Things were made more difficult because the account was opened in January 1993 and has been dormant since 2004, but wasn’t officially switched to Barclays until August 2007. There’s £887 in it, which is a little short of the £1,000 you had guessed.
As some account signatories have died, Barclays is going to arrange for you to provide a letter signed by the current directors of your lodge on headed notepaper. It has already written to you to get the process started.
Yours is the second letter I’ve dealt with recently where a charity account has been mislaid. I think this serves as a reminder to those handling money for charities of how important it is to be diligent about recordkeeping and succession planning so that, when one person moves out of the picture, another can take their place.
It is also a requirement to have accurate audited accounts. After all, this is money people have raised and given in the expectation that it will be put to good use.
So, it’s a big pat on the back to Barclays. I am sure you will find wise ways to spend this windfall. LAST summer, my gas meter had gone ‘round the clock’ so all the numbers had reset to zero.
It soon became clear that Npower’s systems couldn’t accept the figure I had provided. I spoke to at least six call centre agents and was fobbed off.
Eventually, they realised they had calculated our usage on the basis of metric, rather than imperial, units since I moved to them in December 2013.
They wrote saying my monthly debit of £43 was inadequate and that I owed them £342.97, after having apparently written off a number of older bills.
I felt this was unreasonable, as I’d been persuaded to move to their capped deal on the basis of an inaccurate quotation.
I referred it to the Energy Ombudsman and eventually received an apology and a small cash payment, but no proper resolution.
After I gave them further readings in late December, they ‘adjusted’ my account — and suddenly suggested I owed more than £900. I eventually
obtained a breakdown of the figures and pointed out a simple arithmetical error.
M. L., via email. NpoWer has made a right mess of your account. In an email dated February 2 from the executive complaints officer, you were informed they had got your night and day readings the wrong way round for several years. As a result, you owed £735.37.
This clearly implied you had a type of meter that would give you separate rates for night and day use. But you say you don’t have one of these, and have only ever given one reading.
Npower had already written off £2,692.59 under back-billing rules which say that customers will not be held responsible for bills more than 12 months old, as long as they have generally been co-operative with readings and providing access. Npower also referred to bills going back to June 2012, though you are adamant that you joined in December 2013.
I think the worst part of your case is that it was supposedly being handled by the executive complaints office, suggesting your dispute had already been escalated. Yet it still could not get it right.
I am pleased to say it has now looked at your account again and re-billed you using your own readings. The good news is your new, accurate bill showed you had £270 left to pay: considerably less than it had asked for.
The even better news is that, due to all the hassle it’s caused, Npower has written this off, so you have nothing left to pay. I OWN a share in a small office property with my sister. I am thinking of selling this to her to help my daughter with a house deposit.
My share has grown by around £100,000, so there would be capital gains tax to pay.
What would be the situation if I gifted my share of the office to my daughter and she then sold it? The money will go to her
either way, so inheritance tax is not my concern.
G. T., Surrey IF oNlY avoiding tax were that simple. But loopholes seem only to apply to multinational businesses and the super-wealthy.
patricia Mock, tax director at accountant Deloitte, says making a gift of the property to your daughter will, as far as capital gains tax is concerned, have the same consequences as selling it directly to your sister.
You will have to pay capital gains tax on the £100,000 increase in value of your share, less costs.
You have an annual capital gains tax exemption on the first £11,100. Ms Mock stresses that this assumes it’s a rental property. (If it is used in a trade carried on by you, the rules may differ.)
Ms Mock says that, if you did give the property, you would need to get a valuation at the time of the gift. Your daughter may then also make a gain, depending on how long she held the property.
This would be calculated as the difference between the sale proceeds and the value when you gifted it to her. This gain could be set against her own annual capital gains tax exemption.