“It’s my money,” says Kemptville resident Cathie Adeney, who believes Scotiabank should not have withheld funds from a Registered Education Savings Plan for more than two months because of her refusal to answer questions regarding her net worth and salary.

I was floored … I couldn’t believe it. I walked out of that bank without my money.

— Cathie Adeney

Driving home that day last May, she wondered what she was would tell her son, Jackson, who begins classes at Conestoga College in Kitchener next week and needed at least some of the funds to cover deposits and other expenses. Adeney ended up giving him money from her own pocket. “I told the bank: You’re creating a financial hardship.”

Adeney says the Scotiabank branch in Kemptville did not give her a good reason as to why it wanted or needed the information in the first place.

“It’s not that I can’t (provide the information), but I don’t see why I have to,” says the information technology worker.

Was the information sought for marketing purposes, as Adeney suspects, or was it a legal requirement, as Scotiabank and the Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada, a self-regulatory body for mutual fund dealers such as banks, maintain?

Under, revised MFDA policy, client information is collected when a mutual fund account for an RESP or Registered Retirement Savings Plan is opened. A mutual fund is a professionally-managed investment program made up of a pool of money collected from many investors for the purpose of entrusting in securities such as stocks and bonds.

The Ontario Securities Commission would say only that the bank may have been seeking income and net worth data “to update the client profile for other investment accounts.”

It did not indicate whether it was a legal requirement.

If it is a legal requirement, then why, asks Adeney, was she eventually asked by the bank in May to “make up” the numbers as “accuracy wasn’t important.” Adeney says there was no way she was going to provide false numbers, and why would a financial institution want those anyway? Adeney says the bank worker she dealt with first and then the manager explained the money would not be released as the information requirement is programmed into the bank’s computer system.

Adeney says she was told she was the first customer to challenge such a request.

I said: ‘Show me where it says contractually I have to answer these questions to get my money … I asked if there were any tax implications — like is there something I’m missing here?’ They said: ‘This is the way it is.’

After leaving the bank empty-handed, she pursued the matter with Scotiabank’s head office in Toronto.

http://ottawacitizen.com/storyline/scotiabank-finally-admits-its-mistake-in-holding-back-funds-after-a-woman-refuses-to-answer-banks-questions