Knowing your customer

[Ken Brown]

"R. A. Hettinga" wrote:

[...]

 
> I am not, of course, a banking lawyer, but I certainly hang out with enough
> of those folks these days, I've certainly had enough of this stuff shoved
> into my head over the years, and, I expect that to get a bank account
> without a Social Security number in most states of the US, you probably
> need to prove that you are indeed a foreign national, *and* provide a valid
> passport as proof of same, and that, frankly, the passport number would be
> used *somewhere* as a proxy for SSN where possible.


I manage to pay some US income tax (on some share dividends) without
ever having a US SSN. They seem happy not to identify you when they are
taking your money.  Funny that :-)

[...]

> Modern nation-states have bound up so much of their regulatory and tax
> structure into book entry settlement, that it is very hard, more probably
> impossible, to get a bank account in this country without being completely,
> positively, whatever that means, identified -- biometrically identified, if
> it were cheap enough, and certainly with a state-issued identification
> number.

UK domestic bank accounts usually require some proof of id, though not
our equivalent of your SSN (The "national insurance number" - I suspect
most people don't know theirs, but it is printed on every payslip &
probably hard to keep secret). There is no official government id in UK,
except for passports which of course many people have not got. 

Banks are very keen on proof of address, they ask to see "official"
letters (like the gas bill - or an account from another bank) addressed
to your name at your house. In fact it is all but impossible to get a
bank account without a permanent address. As these days many employers
only pay wages through bank accounts... well, that's just one of the
reasons the number of homeless people in London went steadily up during
the 1980s & early 1990s when employment and prosperity were increasing &
the value of welfare benefits was falling.

[...]

Ken