A four-digit number of customers were affected by a delay in issuing annual tax returns.
(Photo: dpa)
Frankfurt Commerzbank is having problems issuing some annual tax certificates for 2021. Upon request, the bank confirmed that there were delays in certain cases. According to a spokeswoman, customers who have several depots at the institute are affected.
Actually, Commerzbank has to issue a bundled income statement to customers with several accounts and custody accounts. The institute would have had to adapt its software for this. However, there were delays.
The reason for this is a failed major IT project at the institute: the bank originally wanted to outsource securities processing to the major British bank HSBC. As a result, the responsibility for issuing the complete tax overview for the securities accounts would also have passed to HSBC.
But in the summer of 2021, Commerzbank boss Manfred Knof stopped the project because of many difficulties. The responsibility for these certificates thus shifted back to Commerzbank.
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Hundreds of customers are affected
A four-digit number of customers are said to be affected by the problem, according to financial circles. How many customer custody accounts Commerzbank has in total is unknown, as is the number of customers who have multiple custody accounts.
The Commerzbank spokeswoman emphasized that the responsible teams would work “at full speed” to solve the problems. For the most part, the problems have already been resolved, but in some cases this has not yet happened.
The “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, which first reported on the customer complaints, wrote in its Saturday edition about some problems that would go beyond these delays. In one case, for example, a customer’s so-called loss bucket is no longer reported. The loss pot is used to offset taxable price gains from securities transactions against previous losses.
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Commerzbank emphasized that it cannot rule out individual cases. However, the institute is not aware of a systematic problem.
The failed IT project, which is considered one of the reasons for the delays, led to a special write-off of 200 million euros and additional provisions in the tens of millions.
The IT director at the time, Jörg Hessenmüller, who had only informed about the problems late, had to go. The bank also reduced his bonus as well as that of his predecessor, Frank Annuscheit.
More: Commerzbank cuts bonus payments to ex-board members after IT disaster