I just received my first USA dividends (AT&T) and I was just shocked that the only thing I received (in app only) was that didivend was 0.44$ per share and total amount in EUR.
What I must report to our national TAX agency (Slovenian FURS) is:
brutto amount before TAX, in case of AT&T that is 0.52$ per share
foreign tax paid, so that’s 0.078$ (that’s 15%)
But the only thing that’s visible inside app is 0.44$ which is 0.52$-0.078$ rounded to two digits.
I can’t report this, since I have no proof that any foreign tax was paid.
I can live with rounding and that no USD to EUR conversion is provided (which is provided if you buy or sell stock) but unfortunately dividend report is a deal breaker for me.
For me that’s unfortunately a deal-breaker and I see no other option but to sell everything and close the account.
Quote from T212: “we do not offer statements for dividends that have been received”.
How hard it is to provide a similar form for dividends as for buy / sell?
I just need: total brutto dividend amount in USD and total foreign tax paid in USD (I have to calculate this to EUR myself using ECB rate).
Is nobody else bothered by this? How do you manage taxes in your country? In Slovenia we have 27,5% tax on dividends, so we have to pay additional 12,5% in our country (because 15% was already paid in USA, but we have to prove this).
The 0.52 per share is a matter of public record and can be found recorded on lots of websites. So is the exchange rate for the day of payment. (You will need to look up the official pay date as it will differ from the date T212 pays you.)
I would expect the tax authorities to accept your calculations without any paperwork from T212. All you need to do is prove you owned the shares and say what you recieved is net of 15% US witholding tax. I am sure this would be sufficient for HMRC in the UK. As you say, 0.52$-0.078$ = 0.442. I expect if you had 100 shares then T212 pay you the full 44.2 not 44.0. The 0.44 is just for display convenience.
That’s true. It is only a programming task. Above is a snip of what a report looks like from AJ Bell. But notice they do not tell me what was the USD amount.
And below is an example from Interactive Investor. Notice that they tell me the Euro amount and leave it to me to calculate how much that was in GBP on the given date. So I have to look up the exchange rates.
Finally, Degiro gives only a summary. This does not even list all the shares on own and the various dividends, only a total for the UK tax year in GBP. They tell me nothing about the USD amounts of the dividends.
So all these brokers leave gaps in reporting of some sort which I have to fill in by my own labours. None of them provide the records as a spreadsheet of csv file that I could work with.
I instead keep my records with Google sheets. It has great functions for finding exchange rates on certain days, and stock prices. E.g.
But since it is only a programming task that has to be done once, I would think T212 could steal a march on others by providing to its customers tax reporting information that is truly comprehensive.
That scrapes a Yahoo finance page for the dividend information of the stock whose ticker is in cell B14. Manually, I sometimes look at nasdaq.com, where they tell you about dividends, ex-div and pay dates.
I am also interested in this, a yearly statement should be provided showing the 15% tax payed (W8BEN form) and the loss/gain from purchase/sell and dividend.
Can this be evaluated by trading 212 development team?
I would love to see that feature as well… The Tax and Customs Board wants to get everything explained, if having no proof of taxes payed they might just execute double taxation.
Other platforms typically do not show calculation of loss/gain from purchases and sales. They just show value of purchase and value of sale. The client is left to figure the gain/loss. This is because calculation of gain/loss for capital gains tax liability is beyond the scope of a platform to know. Perhaps the investor holds shares of the same stock on another platform also, which means the investor’s average purchase price for this stock may be in fact quite different to that on T212. Also different countries have differing matching rules about which purchases should match to a given sale. E.g. In UK it is those made the same day, then those within 30 days subsequently, then all those during days previous to the sale, called a Section 104 holding. There is no getting around the fact that a investor/trader has to keep his or her own records and cannot expect a platform to handle all this calculation correctly on their behalf. A platform like T212 does not know enough to do so.
The key data that T212 should provide is the value of any purchase or sale in the investor’s base currency (which they do) and a statement of any foreign taxes paid. The last of these is a bit more problematic as dividends are often received a few days after the official payment date. Strictly speaking, one should use the exchange rate for the official payment date, not the date that the dividend turns up in your T212 account. Probably the best T212 can do is tell you the value of dividend on a US stock and the value of the 15% tax that was withheld. You have to figure out for your tax authority the values of these in your home currency on the payment date.
So, T212: will we get annual tax report (at latest january 2021) that will show for each dividend received:
date received
company
total gross amount in original currency
total tax already paid in original currency
I really think that’s a minimum and from what I received from other users, other brokers like Degiro and IB have such an annual document (above it was written that Degiro prints only summary, but “ Activity -> Account statement” has all needed data).
I wonder why you have to pay extra tax on top of that 15% W8BEN should ensure that you need to pay your tax once. Here in Estonia we don’t have to pay any extra if 15% has already withheld, and in case no taxes have paid, then it’s needed to pay income tax of 21%. Maybe you should dig into that if it’s similar over there as well.
@VippeR I read on Internet that dividend tax rate in Estonia is 14%, which may explain why there is no further tax to pay if 15% has already been levied. However, in the UK there is a £2000 tax free allowance on dividends, then 7%, 32.5% or 38.1% depending on taxpayer’s total income. In the case of the later two there is extra 17.5% or 23.1% tax to pay to HMRC beyond the 15% that went to the US treasury.
In Slovenia dividend tax is 27.5%, so we have to pay additional 12.5% on top of 15% tax witheld in USA. But we have to prove that 15% was already paid and T212 does’t provide any document that would serve as proof.
T212 tells you how much you have received for your dividends. it tells you both the number of shares and the payment amount.
information on the dividend is released publicly by the respective company and can be found by anyone who looks for it online. if you want to “prove” tax has been paid, you need only show the amount of shares held, payment received and the actual dividend per share released by the company.
For comparison, in the UK there is no requirement to submit any documentation when competing an annual tax return (perhaps this different in Slovenia, I don’t know). One simply reports one’s own calculation of dividends received and foreign tax paid. The tax authorities know that US company dividend are subject to 15% withholding tax.
In the very unlikely event that the self-reporting is questioned by the tax office, then there would be adequate documentation to back up the truthfulness of taxpayer’s report, just as @Dao has said. I see this as being more about helping T212 customers calculate tax X and gross amount Y from knowing the received amount Z. Hint: Z+X=Y, and Z=0.85Y.
Personally I am content to do those calculations. I think the most useful thing would be an “activity report” that can be downloaded as a csv spreadsheet, particularly if one were receiving hundreds of dividend payments per year.
Just because the dividend received is less from the total dividend by a number that is equal to the hypothetical tax that should be paid does not prove who took the difference. This could be anyone intermediary.
Plus we are talking about the tax offices where you need to prove exactly where the money has been paid, they are not going to sit and research what you are claiming. At least in my country…
An official document is needed that states exactly what and where has been received and paid.
Exactly. Tax departments here in Portugal are very demanding as well and piling up this information ourselves is not going to work. We need an official statement from our broker.
That being said, we need an annual report showing what we have earned and how much tax has been payed already.
@George said they will have to evaluate this matter so we also need to give the development team some time to think the best way they can do it since this is a tool that, if properly thought and developed, has the potential to be as useful as time saving for us by the time we need to present taxes ( I am asking for something as simple as having all math done by the Trading 212 algorithm, should be possible )
Welcome to the community. Cute. How did you do that? The CDF or the Invest practice? What did you buy and sell? I expect real data is being used and it is not rigged. I found the prices on the practice to be the same as on the real accounts.
However, most people are not willing to take on as much risk with their own real money as they will do with a simulation. What happened on the one out of three attempts that you did not reach 1m?
Note that weekend trading is simulated on the practice environment:
Practice quotes are randomised on Saturdays and Sundays to enable sampling our platform during the weekend. An exception to that simulation is the crypto market (CFD Only): Those quotes(crypto quotes) are market prices even during weekends.
Aside from that, it’s the same codebase with the same data feed*. You got lucky.
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