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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

Lawyer here. Every time I have a new client I have to obtain picture ID, check their share registers etc. Doesn't matter that most of my clients are entrepreneurs, startups or venture funds. Doesn't matter that all their transactions go through banks that have already checked the transactions and the people involved once and that all transactions are ultimately registered in public registers such as the commerce register.

If I were suspecting that a client's transaction was part of some tax evasion scheme, European Union law would require me to report it to the authorities (although it's not clear that these requirements are in themselves lawful).

All this nonsense costs lots of time and money for me and ultimately for my clients.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the scumbags who actually launder money, do it more or less out in the open and they are not even put to jail.

View on HN

The regulatory environment HSBC is operating in is more or less the regulatory environment you're complaining about. The law requires HSBC to monitor billions of wire transfers, to breathe down the neck of suspicious persons using their banks, and monitor all of its branches for criminal activity, and they basically did that--but not as much as the US demanded. You don't send an executive to jail because a guy several layers down did something wrong, and popular outrage feels the executive should, somehow, be personally and criminally responsible for that.

The idea that HSBC executives are guilty of... violating the article author's feelings about how anti-drug law should work, or something... is why you don't get your financial news from an unbalanced liar in Rolling Stone magazine. But even Taibbi can't seem to identify what precisely the executives are guilty of, an important prerequisite to prosecution in a nation governed by the rule of law.

As for the regulations, they are the reason why you can't open an account or move large amounts of money without giving the bank enough information to know a substantial portion of your entire financial history, and giving the bank permission to freeze your accounts approximately whenever they feel like it or whenever the government demands. You can think this is a good thing or a bad thing, but since you, Mr. Lawyer, complain about you having to burden yourself with the responsibility of knowing your client, surely you feel it's unfair that banks have to do the same thing? Not to mention the privacy implications.

And the law makes the executives responsible for implementation of this, which they clearly did not do effectively. The executives are not guilty of an anti-drug law, but a money laundering law, and the liability is pretty clear. The current maximum sentence is 5 years, although the "Holding Individuals Accountable and Deterring Money Laundering Act" is trying to raise this to 20. All these types of regulation about money laundering and bribery have executive liability.

Please point me to the law that the executives broke that would send them to jail. Cross-reference it with the government's charges.

If you read the DOJ's side of things, HSBC is guilty of things like "we said Mexico is high-risk, HSBC disagreed and so failed to automatically monitor a bunch of transactions," in more legalistic language.

How about basic decency? You have to admit that there is a parallel here with many "everyday" drug cases, and that the punishment of ordinary people in parallel situations is drastically disproportionate to the punishment of HSBC.

It's extremely hard to send drug kingpins to jail, and these are people who are actually breaking the law.

I'm sure, however, that the US government can try to prosecute mid-level HSBC managers and maybe some random bank tellers in Jersey and Mexico and wherever. Somehow I doubt this is what the article author actually wants to happen.

"I'm sure, however, that the US government can try to prosecute mid-level HSBC managers and maybe some random bank tellers in Jersey and Mexico and wherever."

They are not even doing that. And given your view that the executives should not get done because of mid level managers being responsible, what do you think of the fact that they are not being held to account either? Or do you honestly believe that this money was laundered through HSBC with nobody at HSBC helping?

If you're a bank, your services will be used to launder money. It's guaranteed to happen. All you can do is implement controls to keep that activity below a certain threshold. And banks reasonably want to implement as few controls as they can get away with while complying with the law, because it costs them money to do so. Failure to implement sufficient controls for compliance is not tantamount to an intent to assist money laundering.

There's absolutely no parallel here to the situation of ordinary people. If you see that Joe Schmoe's bank account was used to launder money from a drug cartel, you can very reasonably infer that he intended to assist that cartel. There's no reasonable explanation that involves trying to save money or hassle on regulatory compliance issues. Those sorts of transactions don't just accidentally or incidentally happen to ordinary people.

New York State Penal Law Charge 62. DANY alleges, and HSBC Holdings admits, that its conduct, as described herein, violated New York State Penal Law Sections 175.05 and 175.10, which make it a crime to, “with intent to defraud, . . . (i) make[ ] or cause[ ] a false entry in the business records of an enterprise [defined as any company or corporation] . . . or (iv) prevent[ ] the making of a true entry or cause the omission thereof in the business records of an enterprise.” It is a felony under Section 175.10 of the New York State Penal Law if a violation under Section 175.05 is committed and the person or entity’s “intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”

http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/hsbc/dpa-attachment-a.p...

Starting in the first para http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/hsbc/dpa-attachment-a.p..., the DOJ says they have violated the Bank Secrecy Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act which has punishments including imprisonment.

The Bank Secrecy act encapsulates hundreds of pages of law and regulations. Which part are you talking about?

You can't just link a law and say "it says somewhere here someone can go to prison for some reason, so I'm sure that bank executives should go to prison." The Wikipedia article's blurb about prison does not seem to cover HSBC's conduct, but it's also hopelessly vague.

The DOJ themselves said HSBC is in violation, therefore the point is made without the need for us lay readers to know the exact part.

???

The Bank Secrecy Act carries with it an enormous amount of different regulations and different laws and different penalties. The exact part is what you need to make your "point". If you can't produce it, no point has been made.

The DOJ hasn't bothered to produce any reason to throw executives in jail, and I bet you can't either. Blithe self-righteousness is not a reason. A vague reference to a multi-hundred-page set of laws and regulations is not a reason.

Ok, thanks for participating in our conversation

The DOJ hasn't bothered to produce any reason to throw executives in jail

New York State Penal Law Sections 175.05 and 175.10

edit - 175.10, which HSBC have admitted guilt to, is a class E felony in NY, which apparently has sentencing guidelines of up to four years in prison with a minimum of one year.

That could be real or it could be posturing. That's why we have a court system - to hash these kinds of things out.

It's not at all uncommon for prosecutors to say things like that and then not file charges because they know they can't get a conviction.

I am busy right now coding to go through in detail, but here [1] is an example of someone who was imprisoned under the BSA for "conspiring to fail to file currency transaction reports and failing to have effective AML and compliance programs", which certainly applies to HSBC.

[1] http://compliance.saiglobal.com/community/news/item/4420-che...

No, HSBC didn’t disagree. They initially agreed, then /executives/ at the bank said “this will reduce profitability, so we need to change our position”.

They are very much at fault.

We don’t need to cross-reference anything. You should be disproving things. Why? Because HSBC admitted guilt and liability.

"You don't send an executive to jail because a guy several layers down did something wrong"

Why not? You PAY him based on what that guy several layers down does...

Because you send people to jail for committing crimes, actually doing things that violate the law. Simply being employed by a company to manage some lawbreaker isn't a crime.

And if you'd like to propose making it a crime, I'd encourage you to first think about how exactly it could be twisted - how to separate the really-morally-responsible the scapegoats, in advance, with nothing but legal language.

You can go to prison for being an accessory if it can be shown that you were consciously aware that the crime was going on but did not stop/report it, or that you not being consciously aware is due to gross negligence on your part.

Of course the outrage comes from the fact that corporate structures offer so many layers of plausible deniability. At the end of the day, we would have to be fools to believe that billions in money laundering or price fixing are happening at these banks orchestrated, as the executives would have us believe, by a small group of malevolent peons expertly covering their tracks. It's just common sense that lots of people know what's going on and turn a blind eye because it's good for business and there's virtually no chance it'll actually get pinned on them.

I think you're missing the point. The issue here is that we have two prosecution regimes at work: one for the banks which works by more or less the rules you propose, and one for "everyone else", which very much doesn't. Your idea of only prosecuting bank employees with direct connection to the crimes seems like cold comfort to all the people threatened with arrest, in prison (or hell, even shot) because of the activities of their husbands and roommates.

Strangely, libertarian hacker types tend not to come to their defense as quickly as they do bank executives.

In the US, something like this is already a crime under Sarbanes-Oxley.

In America a company is considered an individual/has a social security number correct?

Then you should be able to seize that individuals assets and while you can't send a company to jail you can bankrupt it.

If we're going to consider all companies as people then all laws should be applied to said people.

Well, ok, then what do you do with all the money sitting in deposits in the bank? Just mail a check back to people?

This is why the executives should be criminally chargeable. Banks are systemically important, but the executives are not.

In that case, care of the various customer accounts should be sold off to another bank.

> Well, ok, then what do you do with all the money sitting in deposits in the bank?

There's a couple ways you could handle a "corporate death sentence" applied to a bank: 1. You could treat it as if the bank had failed completely -- all assets are forfeited, but customers receive refunds on insured (e.g., covered by FDIC) accounts only up to the amount insured. This would create some risk for large depositors, which could be considered bad, or could be considered good as it would encourage large depositors to take an active interest in how banks are run which would create pressure on behavior which would reduce the likelihood of needing to impose sanctions.

2. You could treat it as a facilitated sale of the corporation itself -- either in one unit or split into pieces with different buyers -- with any proceeds going to government rather than the shareholders.

> In America a company is considered an individual/has a social security number correct?

No, in America (as everywhere else corporations exist, since this is the very definition of a corporation) a corporation is considered a legal person (that is, an entity subject to legal process in its own identity). In America, corporations have Tax ID numbers, which serve (for tax purposes, though not for Social Security itself) a purpose similar to Social Security numbers.

I think it's to be expected that governments that live off taxes force companies, that receive large cash deposits or whose business it is to receive, store or transfer money, to identify those individuals and businesses whose money they receive, store or transfer.

I don't receive any cash payments and I don't make any cash payments in my business. I am not a financial institution. This year, the value of the transactions that I participated in was probably around 100 million euro or so, and a fraction of a percent of this went through my account or ended up on my account, and all of it came from and went to banks. Not a cent was received in cash. Not a cent was paid out in cash. Now, HSBC and other banks probably have billions flowing through their system every second and in the order of millions received in cash or paid out in cash every second. I think it's natural to burden a few thousand banks with these rules, and not millions of small businesses.

Banks don't have the same access to your clients that you do. Their fraud monitors are giant machine-learning racks of computers.

If one were to adopt the position that it is the responsibility of business to prevent fraud, well, you have a unique ability to do that that no other institution has. This is why I think your post is hypocrisy. Banks aren't lawyers, they don't know your clients like you do, and if you adopt the principle that "people should be responsible for the actions of their customers", you're going to have a significant amount of responsibility that nobody else can handle.

Lawyers should be responsible to their clients, not serve as an extra layer of tax informants. Governments already have hundreds of thousands in their employ. And please spare your hypocracy remarks for someone you know.

Lawyers are partly agents of the government. The alternative would be to make private lawyering illegal and to require all lawyer-type work to be done at goverenment offices.

Lawyers should be responsible to their clients, not serve as an extra layer of tax informants.

I was under the impression this is how it worked eg. that lawyers' only responsibility are to their client. Otherwise you would get some kind of weird conflict of interest in every case.

If one were to adopt the position that it is the responsibility of business to prevent fraud

Well, it is the responsibility of HSBC to prevent criminal fraud by HSBC, which is one of the charges they plead guilty to in their plea bargain.

>> You don't send an executive to jail because a guy several layers down did something wrong

First , they are responsible as managers like others said.

But we're talking about serious allegations of supporting terrorism. For a common citizen , any strong link to terrorism means some extra legal horrible torture . But for HSBC's managers , even repeated offenses and warnings mean nothing.

> and monitor all of its branches for criminal activity, and they basically did that--but not as much as the US demanded

I'm not convinced that it wasn't completely obvious. The Mexico unit shipped $7 Billion to the US unit. Why did Breuer call it "stunning failures of oversight"?

> You don't send an executive to jail because a guy several layers down did something wrong

So why are the bonuses of those execs being cut if they are not to blame? Again, why did Breuer call it "stunning failures of oversight"?

I'm also not convinced they won't use this as a horrible excuse to unnecessarily increase monitoring, while the entire thing was plainly visible under an existing system. I would like cash to stay private, can i really not have that without something like this being invisible?

http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/10/news/companies/hsbc-money-la...

" You don't send an executive to jail because a guy several layers down did something wrong, and popular outrage feels the executive should, somehow, be personally and criminally responsible for that."

1. Just to be clear, they didn't put the anti money laundering people who were literally in charge of verifying compliance with these laws in jail either, even though they knew they were laundering money for the drug cartels. The government alleged, and HSBC never denied, that they had actual knowledge of what the money was being used for. It's not a case of "oh, well, i had no idea bob at the teller window was doing this".

This isn't "the guys several layers down did something wrong"

This is "We knew were laundering money for the drug cartels. We intentionally flouted the law (government's words) to keep it that way."

2. It's not "wrong", it's criminal. What HSBC did is criminal. They were charged criminally. This is a deferred prosecution agreement. They knew they were laundering money for drug cartels. "But even Taibbi can't seem to identify what precisely the executives are guilty of, an important prerequisite to prosecution in a nation governed by the rule of law." This isn't even close to right. You should try reading the charging documents that led to this settlement. The prosecutors make very clear what they are guilty of, and lay out a case that makes clear the executives knew exactly what was going on. They even created fake banking products to get around the law, too.

The entire setup was a sham from the start. The reason HSBC didn't deny everything is because publicly being fined and saying nothing about it was the condition on avoiding prosecution. Remember, the PATRIOT Act can give bankers 20 year jail sentences even if they did not know what was happening. Jailing innocent people from crimes committed by basically random other people is absurd and yet that is what Congress has put in place.

If your choice, as a banker, was to piss off a government hell-bent on making you a scapegoat and risk going in front of a jury of poor people who hate bankers, charged of violating a law it's impossible not to violate, and which carries a 20 year jail sentence, you would agree to a deal as well.

The US allegations were ridiculous anyway. They claimed HSBC "knew" there was money laundering taking place merely because money was moving from Mexico to America. I'm sure HSBC execs, having read newspapers and watched TV, were quite confident there was drug money in that stream. This is quite different to knowing precise account numbers of drug cartels with a high degree of certainty. I don't recall the latter being alleged, however.

35. Even when HSBC Mexico determined a relationship should be terminated, it often took years for the account to actually be closed. In December 2008, there were approximately 675 accounts pending closure based on suspicions of money laundering activity. Closure had been approved for 16 of those accounts in 2005, 130 in 2006, 172 in 2007, and 309 in 2008. All 675 of these accounts remained open into at least 2009, with transactions being actively conducted through them despite facing pending closure based on suspicion of money laundering activity.

36. Between 2004 and 2007, HSBC Mexico exported over $3 billion U.S. dollars per year to the United States through Banknotes. In November 2007, Banco de Mexico, the central bank of Mexico, expressed concerns about the volume of U.S. dollars exported by HSBC Mexico back to the United States. Specifically, Banco de Mexico wanted an explanation as to why HSBC Mexico’s U.S. dollar exports were significantly larger than its market share would suggest.

37. In February 2008, HSBC Mexico’s CEO met with the head of the CNBV and the head of Mexico’s financial intelligence unit, Unidad de Inteligencia Financiera (“UIF”). Again, the volume of HSBC Mexico’s U.S. dollar exports was raised as a concern. Specifically, HSBC Mexico’s CEO was told that law enforcement in Mexico and the United States were seriously concerned that the U.S. dollars being deposited at HSBC Mexico might represent drug trafficking proceeds. HSBC Mexico’s CEO was also told that Mexican law enforcement possessed a recording of a Mexican drug lord saying that HSBC Mexico was the place to launder money.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/hsbc/dpa-attachment-a.p...

As an individual, all these "know your customer" and "anti-money laundering" laws are a massive drag. When I moved to the UK it was nearly impossible to open a personal account (despite already having secured the right to work from the government--which vetting is quite substantial). The bank wanted utility bills with my residential address, but clearly I needed a bank account to get a home and utilities. It took four visits to the bank branch to get this sorted, each time resulting in more excuses about how they couldn't help because of KYC, AML, and CYA.

If they want to fight money laundering, fine, give me an account with a minimal cash flow limit or some other restrictions. But the modern regulatory regime has infected retail banking to such a degree that normal humans with good jobs can no longer open an account at all. Clearly professional criminals continue to work the system just fine, meanwhile.

That's why cryptocurrencies are so good. Nobody can deny you when creating an account or moving your money.

How would that have helped me pay my electric bill? I mean sure, if the electric company wanted to support it, OK, but they'd sooner support credit cards or PayPal, don't you think?

I mean, the perspective.

I don't like this system when you need a bank account to get a home and utilities. Why can't you use cash? I don't like that the bank wanted your utility bills with your residential address just to create an account for you. What for? They want to control everything. I just don't like that.

You can just use cash if you have a key meter like millions of people in the UK.

You don't need an account.

You'll pay a hefty premium for that though - it's just one of the ways life is more expensive for the poor than for the wealthy.

I don't need a bank account for utilities in the US. The easiest way to pay is by check my mail or credit card online but if you did not have a bank account you can pay in person or get a money order or maybe even a prepaid debit card?

Note that the law requires that all debts, public and private, can be settled using legal tender (ie. cash).

In practice this is mostly implemented by demanding the person pay cash at a post office.

You do not need a bank account to pay for utilities in the US. I'm not saying not having one will be very pleasant though.

> You do not need a bank account to pay for utilities in the US. I'm not saying not having one will be very pleasant though.

I came to the conclusion that in the US, if you have everything that people usually have (SSN, bank account, credit card, residential address, phone number, car, drivers license), you will be treated well. Miss just one on list, and people will assume that something is wrong with you, and it probably triggers a few warning signs (e.g. in fraud detection systems).

It may be coming from the fact that homeless and criminal elements usually miss a few on the list, so it was considered an easy signal for such pre-filtering, however, moving from a different country has the same signals, triggering multiple false alarms.

As a non-US person who moved to the Bay area ~2 years ago, I have found found several difficulties with either method you have mentioned:

First, if you have just move there, and don't have a bank account, you don't have checkbook either (there are countries who has no checks at all) - no check by mail.

No utilities accepted credit or debit card, they always wanted to have a proper bank account number from me. Later on they have improved their system and now they offer online bill pay, with an extra "convenience fee" for credit cards. Hurray! (Although I am not sure if the bank account is still a requirement for opening.)

Btw. similar story applies for wireless service: I was required to provide my full employment contract to receive a simple phone number (at that point I had bank account, active employment...). How weird is that?

The 'you don't need a bank account' method in the parent was the money order (there is also usually a way to pay in person, lots utilities do this in concert with convenience and grocery stores).

The wireless thing is because the phone companies treat the account as a credit account. The easy way around it is some prepaid plan (which is possible to fund in cash...). 5 years ago it wasn't such a good option. These days a $50 prepaid plan is at least reasonable, even if it isn't the best option.

The usual postpaid cellular account that most US providers want to sell is indeed a credit account. They're usually paying hundreds up front towards your phone, plus accepting the payments after you've used the service.

For cellular, prepaid seems to solve all of the problems everywhere I've been. I ordered a prepaid SIM card here in the US over the internet with nothing but a credit card number, has full data service and everything. Same thing everywhere else I've travelled in the last year.

Around the beginning of 2013, I took a trip to UAE, Norway, and the Netherlands. In each of those, I was able to get a prepaid SIM card at the airport for cash, with nothing but a passport for ID. All with phone, text, and data service.

I paid my electric in person before years ago before I started paying online and I had a problem with mail delivery and they didn't mail me a bill to mail back. It was simple.

I also knew someone who paid their phone bill in person every month because he was a teenager and didn't have a checking account, but had a cell phone bill.

I ALWAYS pay my electric bill with credit card. No fee.

When I set it up, it required a phone call to turn on, and my name, um, not sure what else. No bank account or anything else. Just a phone call with my name.

Or just use HSBC, apparently.

As someone who just went through this, an FYI for anyone else in this situation: Lloyds Bank will let you open a current account with just a US passport and a UK work visa, no other docs needed. HSBC has a similar account you can get, but, well, see parent story...

Even Lloyds is hit and miss. A general strategy that seems to work is to gather as much documentation as you can (work contract, flat lease, any government paperwork, something that documents your address and status where you come from, anything with the address you live at, even if it doesn't have your name on it etc) and hit the main street banks from one end, eventually one will bite. Don't worry which one you get, you can easily change it later - all you need is for any bank to send you a statement.

I was actually at my 3rd bank trying to open an account, but without any other documentation than my passport & visa. I think it was Halifax. The guy I was speaking went in back for a bit, and per usual said "I'm sorry but without proof of address we can't open an account for you." When I started lamenting my sense of defeat to him about UK banks, he said "okay look, I'm not supposed to say this, but off the record, if you go down the street to Lloyds, they have a special process for US citizens where you can just open an account with a passport." Sure enough I went down the road, and after making yet another appointment (an appointment to open a bank account? really Britain…), they confirmed that indeed they do open accounts for US citizens with just a passport.

So I feel pretty confident in recommending Lloyds in this case.

Lloyds is probably better than average since at least at some point they had a formal process for getting an account without proof of address. But my wife was asked for proof of address there (which she was able to provide) and my friend failed to get an account , but got one at Halifax. I have a few more secondhand anecdotes about other people who was turned away at Lloyds, but taken on at Barclay or HSBC.

I think the case is that it's a rather non-deterministic process and the outcome depends a lot on exactly which manager you talk to and what their mood is like that day.

france does that stupid appointment crap too

I'm just waiting for Lloyds and Barclays to figure out I'm a US citizen and then close out my accounts due to FATCA.

I think the easiest way to get a UK bank account as a foreign national is to be a student.

You need to prove where you lived for the last 3 years. Oh, you don't have paper bills? Your country is very progressive, too bad. Moved around? Well, you need a UK address or at least a rental agreement.

Also showing your current bank account statements will help.

But we'd rather refuse to open this simple checking account just because (...we're busy laundering money :-)...).

And no one gives you the exact goddamn reason or a simple solution.

Paperless billing still has a bill that you can print out, it just means that you wont be mailed a statement every month.

Documents produced on a home printer are meaningless for identity or address verification. Anyone can open the PDF in inkscape and make it say any name, address or date they like.

Isn't it more fraudulent to give the bank home-made documents than to give them nothing? At least when you give then nothing you're being honest about what you're giving them.

Yeah, but that modification is forgery and fraud. In all honesty, I could probably replicate a paper bank statement by doing the same thing. The crime is in the manipulation.

As for me, I continue to print out bank statements on university printers and have everyone from embassies to landlords accept them.

No one I've met believes that going to your bank's website and printing out the PDF they give you is fraudulent.

I was on the phone to British Gas complaining that I suddenly stopped receiving paper statements. The agent on the phone got really helpful all of a sudden when I told him I needed the paper bills for proof of identity.

Turns out he had just gone through the whole debacle himself. He had to show a bank statement, but he only has an online account. Went to the bank to get a statement printed and stamped, and whoever he went to turn it in to still refused it because it hadn't been mailed.

Personally, I don't want to give the BA any easy reason to reject my visa applications, I get all the mailed proof of address I can.

Wow, I guess you just proved all those people saying they couldn't get such papers accepted are clearly lying because you've never had a problem.

The fact that they are so easily manipulated is the reason they are most often not accepted as proof of identification, regardless of criminal law. It could be totally legal and it would be in the best interests of banks/businesses to not accept them due to possible liabilities.

Used to work in retail, sold credit obo Barclays bank - we were told not to accept printed copies of bank statements but I heard stories of people asking customer to log into online banking live.

Chase in the US rejected my recently expired US passport as secondary ID, but accepts my non-expired Indiana vehicle registration, a document laser-printed on ordinary copy paper at the BMV with no graphical elements other than form boxes that'd be trivial to counterfeit. So it's probably safe to say that "difficulty to counterfeit" is not a criterion for secondary ID at Chase (nor, apparently, is mismatched mailing address, because my vehicle isn't registered at the address on my primary ID).

It's mostly just bureaucratic ceremony and British strict rule-following

The UK immigration authority does not recognize printed online statements. I had to print 100 pages from my bank's website, take the paper to my bank branch, and have each page stamped by the bank to make it "original." This is a true story.

Painful. I suppose online statements are too easy to counterfeit? It's a shame the bank couldn't provide authenticated documents to you as a automated service.

Usually those statements or bills have a lovely big DUPLICATE watermarked across them which invalidates them for identification purposes.

You don't really need a bank account to rent a home. In fact, at my first place I've only paid rent with cash or by debit card for almost one year, and it was an agency. Private landlords tend to be even more flexible, basically the ones I've had only cared about being paid on time, not how.

How do you have a debit card with a bank account to attach it to?

Presumably pre-paid credit/debit card (bought with cash a at gas station, grocery store, etc.).

Yeah its bizarre I had to jump through hoops in the UK to open a new ISA account (tax free savings) even if I am a customer of the bank all ready.

Its not like I turn up with with 50k in 500 euro bills and want to open an account that day.

When I did this I got a letter from my employer and then took that to the same branch of the same bank where my employer did their banking. It worked.

Just a nitpick: there is really no such thing as "EU law". EU directives bind nations and force them to implement them in the local context, but any law you are bound to is the local law.

(The distinction is important in the current political climate, since the excuse "it's EU law" is abused by politicians to steamroll the local electorate into believing they have no say in the matter, and pretend they can not be challenged locally. That's how we got screwed with for instance data retention "laws" that are blatantly unconstitutional in several EU member states.)

(a) There are "EU Regulation" which are actual laws. But "Directives" are more common.

(b) Regardless, an EU Directive is essentially an "EU law". It's a distinction without much of a difference.

(c) Some countries' constitutions say "All EU law/directives/whatever are binding and constitutional, unless the country leaves the EU". The Irish constitution has this sort of clause.

(d) EU law/directives/regulation is created by the EU. Which we vote on. European Parliament elections are coming up in 2014. If you think you have no say in the EU, vote in the EP elections and vote in your national elections. Those 2 directly elected bodies control EU law.

EU law is a term used for all regulation from the EU and sometimes for EU court rulings as well. Most EU legislation is issued as "directives" (such as the EU directive on money laundering), which are to be implemented by the member states in their local laws, or "regulations", which apply directly without any need for national implementation. Now, this distinction is blurred by the fact that directives also have direct effects in certain situations (so that the provisions of the directive can be invoked even if they are not implementer), for example when a member state fails to implement it on time or correctly.

As a lawyer you are required to report on your clients? Whatever happened to attorney-client privilege? Does that not exist in your jurisdiction?

Lawyers are not priests, nor doctors. You are misunderstanding what it means. Attorney-client privilege (in theory) only lasts up to the point where the attorney is sure that something is illegal. If that line is crossed, there is a theoretical reporting requirement (that is not specific to lawyers).

A lawyer most certainly does not have the duty to hide the crimes or confessions of his client(s). Not in the EU, not in the US (nor does a priest or doctor, but they can legally choose to do so in most jurisdictions. Anyone who is not a priest or doctor cannot make this choice : you have to report. In practice I've never seen anyone get sued for not reporting anything outside of financials).

Now as for the interpretation of this ... You have the US way (it's not illegal until a court says it is ... there's something to be said for that), and the EU way. The problem in the EU is that a lot of tax collection agencies are less than subtle and have legal rights that mean you simply don't want to even appear to cross them. In Western Europe, a tax agent has the right to shut down any business without specifying a reason, lock any account without specifying a reason, and take anything from any premise without a reason (or lock it down).

Does this violate the relevant constitutions ? Nobody's successfully challenged it as far as I know. (Yet another reason EU criticism of NSA data collection is ridiculously hypocritical).

That doesn't change the basic principle though. If you go to a lawyer saying "I killed this guy, get me out of it", he may go to the police and report you. While the lawyer is unlikely to get sued for not warning the police, when asked a lawyer MUST testify that this has indeed happened (same thing applies to anyone else for that matter).

Ehm, you're being pretty vague here. As far as I can tell, none of what you're saying applies to Belgium, a Western European country if any is, and our tax collection agency is not even close to the IRS when it comes to bullying people and businesses. And the European Union really has very little say over tax collection practices, so I imagine it's different everywhere. So what countries and what practices are you talking about exactly?

Actually the "rights" I alluded to above are the ones from Belgian law, although I do know the Dutch IRS has similar rights (the Dutch one also regularly detains people without (delcared) cause).

If attorney-client privilege works as you've described it, it doesn't make any sense. The prosecution could summon the attorney to testify and divulge all the information he has.

We don't know for sure: http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/fra/pages/search.aspx?i=001-...}

Attorney-client-privilege is an English/American legal term with a lot of meanings to it shaped by the courts.

In the EU, different member states have rules regarding confidentiality between lawyers and clients. Usually, the right to confidentiality is not absolute (the lawyer may have an obligation to speak in certain situations).

For a while lawyers hoped that something like attorney-client-privilege could be interpreted into the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. With the ruling above this seems less likely.

This story underscores that anything goes if you get big enough.

So you can't have a client who's illegally in the country, like asylum seekers, or any ID will do fine? I always thought defending someone in court was like being a doctor, you should help them no matter what.

"All this nonsense costs lots of time and money for me and ultimately for my clients."

Perhaps you could clarify how it costs both your clients money and you money as well?

I'm assuming you are billing your clients for the work that is necessarily in one way or another for having to do this. Or it's part of your overhead and you base your rates in part on your overhead.

For sure it's a pain but there are many things that need to be done in order to be in business. They are necessary evils like filing tax returns or collecting social security numbers and making employees fill out various government required employment forms. It's called "the cost of doing business". Little minor bs that isn't anywhere close to going away.

Which EU regulations are applicable?

I'm asking because I work with lawyers in the EU from time to time and I've never had to provide ID etc. It was always a telephone call or email plus sometimes a retainer.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...

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