# Errors in BMO Investorline December Statement



## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

As most on BMOIL know, BMOIL changed the format of their on-line monthly report in December. One item, is a summary of income received. We have 6 accounts, and that summary is incorrect on all of them. 

Basically, the amounts shown just don't represent the amounts received and shown in the detailed part of the report. In one of our accounts they show that we received $72 in income in 2016 when actual number is closer to $10k (rough number).

I brought this to their attention almost a month ago. They sent me a message today saying that the report was corrected 2 days ago. But it is still unchanged and wrong. All the summary has to do is add up a series of cash flows. 

Anyone else have same problem?


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## yyz (Aug 11, 2013)

Ok you made me look .
I checked the Dec and Nov statements and they both seem out by what they call a dividend on the statement and what the dividend total is.
However I have and I'm going to assume you may have some holdings that are not paying a straight dividend.I'll give an example of Boston Pizza which is a distribution but on the statements show as a dividend. If I remove the holdings that pay a distribution the numbers add up correctly.It appears that unless it is interest being paid they call everything else a dividend although some aren't but they do add the eligible dividends up correctly.
It wouldn't seem to explain a $72 vs $10k discrepancy though.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

yyz said:


> Ok you made me look .
> I checked the Dec and Nov statements and they both seem out by what they call a dividend on the statement and what the dividend total is.
> However I have and I'm going to assume you may have some holdings that are not paying a straight dividend.I'll give an example of Boston Pizza which is a distribution but on the statements show as a dividend. If I remove the holdings that pay a distribution the numbers add up correctly.It appears that unless it is interest being paid they call everything else a dividend although some aren't but they do add the eligible dividends up correctly.
> It wouldn't seem to explain a $72 vs $10k discrepancy though.


We had about $800 in true dividends in December in one account. For example, Exchange Income, Russel Metals, Crescent Point etc. And this is what statement says:



> * Income you received*
> Type of Income Current Month Year-to-Date (YTD)
> Dividends 0.00 72.56
> Total 0.00 72.56


Still no correction or explanation from BMOIL Hard to imagine I am only one with this type of error.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

I am surprised that others with BMOIL have not seen this problem or chimed in. 

I have had a series of mylink message exchanges. Theirs saying that the problem had been corrected and giving me detailed instructions of where to find my corrected estatements! If I didn't know where to find them, how would I have found out they were still wrong and no corrections had been made.

Finally today, I called them. The agent went away and spoke to his upper level guys. Came back and read to me from an internal memo they had received. It stated that their new software had coding errors. This affected all types of income. Interest, Dividends, REIT distributions, Mutual fund distributions etc. How some of those still got into the income received, he did not know. They are apparently working on a fix, but no timeline for completion. Scary part, is that I think he said that the same system will produce the T-slips this year! Deadline for those is getting close!


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Finally I was able to get BMOIL to correct our December Statement. This after 3 months, at least a dozen on-line messages and three phone calls. Finally while on phone got an agent to actually look at just my Jan 2016 statement (It had several hundreds of $$ of dividend income) and compare it with my Dec2016 statement that said I had received $72 for whole year. She finally came back and agreed there should be about $10k of div & interest!

What I found out while investigating this, was that the income summary on BMOIL statements, is only the income that would eventually be on T5 slips. Trust income is reported on T3 slips so is excluded. As a result, the Income figure on their reports is not the actual income you received. So why do they bother including an income summary at all seeing it does not match the actual transaction detail also reported?

What bothers me here, is that it took 3 months to get BMOIL to understand that there was an error in programming or data input to their system. Those errors don't give me any confidence that ANY of their reports are accurate.


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## AltaRed (Jun 8, 2009)

Thank you for your perseverance! I suspect few look at what the brokerage account statements say with respect to monthly and YTD income received. I've never really looked at that data myself on any of my accounts. I only look what I total up on T3s and T5s at tax time (what my tax return rollup says on UFile), and what Quicken* aggregates for me when I roll up all my income from all my accounts for the year.

* Which in itself is not fully accurate because I know that some of my USD income is already posted net of withholding tax, i.e. I am recording the net number and not gross number. Which if I may ask, did you have that discussion with BMOIL? That is, if their software adds up USD account income, is it the net number net of withholding tax or gross number and do they convert at the monthly forex rate? Or annual forex rate?


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## Beaver101 (Nov 14, 2011)

AltaRed said:


> Thank you for your perseverance! I suspect few look at what the brokerage account statements say with respect to monthly and YTD income received. I've never really looked at that data myself on any of my accounts. I only look what I total up on T3s and T5s at tax time (what my tax return rollup says on UFile), and what Quicken* aggregates for me when I roll up all my income from all my accounts for the year.
> 
> * Which in itself is not fully accurate because I know that some of my USD income is already posted net of withholding tax, i.e. I am recording the net number and not gross number. Which if I may ask, did you have that discussion with BMOIL? *That is, if their software adds up USD account income, is it the net number net of withholding tax or gross number and do they convert at the monthly forex rate? Or annual forex rate*?


 ... not that you can't ask agent99 these qusetions but isn't the accountholder's responsibility to figure this all of this out (fx, withholding tax, etc)? given that the brokerage don't even know what's produced on their own reports as per agent99's experience ...


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## Beaver101 (Nov 14, 2011)

agent99 said:


> Finally I was able to get BMOIL to correct our December Statement. at least a dozen on-line messages and three phone calls. Finally while on phone got an agent to actually look at just my Jan 2016 ...
> 
> *What bothers me here, is that it took 3 months to get BMOIL to understand that there was an error in programming or data input to their system*. *Those errors don't give me any confidence that ANY of their reports are accurate*.


 ... and? did you file a complaint? Are they going to fix their systems? Or did they just say "this is the way it is and go away".


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

AltaRed said:


> That is, if their software adds up USD account income, is it the net number net of withholding tax or gross number and do they convert at the monthly forex rate? Or annual forex rate?


The $72.56 that they had showed as my total 2016 income just happened to be from a US based ADR. It was the Gross amount. In this case, the tax is actually withheld by the country of origin and it was reported separately as foreign tax withheld (About -$10.00) Dividends from US companies may be handled differently. You should be able to check this in your transaction records.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Beaver101 said:


> ... not that you can't ask agent99 these qusetions but isn't the accountholder's responsibility to figure this all of this out (fx, withholding tax, etc)? given that the brokerage don't even know what's produced on their own reports as per agent99's experience ...


The reports are not something I would hang my hat on, but the summary of income can be useful as a rough guide as to what we earned each month and total for year. But given that the Income Summary does not include some types of income, it is is not useful. They should either fix it or remove it. 

I don't bother with Quicken or such programs. My wife however, does maintain a spreadsheet of all our income and expense and it was her that noticed the income discrepancy on the Statements. I never look at her stuff!

I do our tax returns and those T-slips we use are prepared by the same outfit that can't get our Statements correct  Maybe we should do more cross-checking!

PS: Just got another Mylink message from some BMOIL agent still saying the discrepancy was due to trust income not being included! Obviously one hand doesn't know what the other is doing. Beaver - This time I did complain and asked the agent to forward my message to their management.


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## AltaRed (Jun 8, 2009)

agent99 said:


> The $72.56 that they had showed as my total 2016 income just happened to be from a US based ADR. It was the Gross amount. In this case, the tax is actually withheld by the country of origin and it was reported separately as foreign tax withheld (About -$10.00) Dividends from US companies may be handled differently. You should be able to check this in your transaction records.


For the heck of it, I decided to see if BMO IL was under reporting monthly income as well.... so checked a couple of monthly statements myself (Dec 16 and Mar 16) and yes, they do not include all income. Didn't try to determine which ones, but suspect the missing data is from trusts, i.e. REITs and ETFs. So their algorithm is f*cked. If I get ambitious today, I my go online via MyLink and reinforce your 'effort'. Some people may be relying on this data....even if I've never looked at it before.

P.S. I find that some USD withholding taxes are reported in different ways in monthly statements. Most are net of withholding taxes (most common) and a few others show gross dividends and then a separate line item for the 15% withholding tax. Doesn't really matter to me.

Added later: I decided to just take the fime and file a complaint via MyLink on this issue. Explained that someone else had gone through this extensively with BMO IL and either BMO IL needs to fix their programming or stop reporting "Income You Received" entirely on monthly account statements.


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## yyz (Aug 11, 2013)

They only report actual dividend income.Not distributions,not anything like premium dividend interest. I suppose they could categorize the different income that goes into the accounts but as of yet they don't.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

I just got around to checking the "updated' December statement they had sent me by secure mail. Well, it was for the wrong account! The one with just $72.56 in annual income is still wrong. It's hard to believe a big bank can be so useless. Anyway, I have a direct line to the lady that I dealt with, so hopefully will get that fixed next week.


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## Beaver101 (Nov 14, 2011)

^ Oh boy :rolleyes2: did they fire all the competent people at BMOIL and replaced them with ? robots?


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## Brainer (Oct 8, 2015)

Okay, I'm a nervous type, so I called and spoke with a BMOIL rep. AFter about 30 minutes on hold and him waiting to speak with his supervisor, he told me that the "dividend" term under "income" meant only pure dividends. NOT fund distributions, not income trust distributions, and of course, not interest. This is a bit confusing to me the way my HISA funds refer to distribs as "dividends". Shouldn't they be called distributions, or are they called dividends because I'm reinvesting?

When I asked, they said the only category under income was dividends. Does anyone else have any other category listed, or do we all just have "dividends"?





Beaver101 said:


> ^ Oh boy :rolleyes2: did they fire all the competent people at BMOIL and replaced them with ? robots?


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

me i think the new BOMIL statement is ghastly. 

the performance calculators for every single client who does options will be wrong. Because efficient option pricing at all brokers is still back in the dark ages. Options that don't trade today show a "last price" that is quite likely to be 2-3-4 weeks old, ie it has no relationship to reality whatsoever.

the performance widget, though, is calibrated to that fake last price, so there goes the accuracy of the performance widget.

to think the IIROC spent millions of dollars forcing brokers to create this kind of gibberish. The only thing that will be more comical will be the TD's new, revised, IIROC-compliant statement, when it finally appears for the june statements. I guess these will see the light of day in july.

.


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## Eclectic12 (Oct 20, 2010)

Brainer said:


> ... the "dividend" term under "income" meant only pure dividends.
> 
> NOT fund distributions, not income trust distributions, and of course, not interest.
> This is a bit confusing to me the way my HISA funds refer to distribs as "dividends". Shouldn't they be called distributions, or are they called dividends because I'm reinvesting?


Not sure what reinvesting has to do with it.

I would much prefer only dividends be called dividends with everything else labeled "distributions" to make it easy for the investor to be clear on what makes up the cash paid. Unfortunately, a lot of sources are calling cash paid dividends, which may or may not be true.




Brainer said:


> ... they said the only category under income was dividends. Does anyone else have any other category listed, or do we all just have "dividends"?


As this is one's broker ... if they are going to the effort to identify dividends, I would have thought they'd all have categories for "distributions" and "interest" as well.


Cheers


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Brainer said:


> When I asked, they said the only category under income was dividends. Does anyone else have any other category listed, or do we all just have "dividends"?


We have nothing that generates interest in our taxable accounts. Just Dividends and trust income. The Income they report is just the dividends. That was also true in the old-style reports it seems.

In our registered accounts we do receive all three types of income. The monthly report shows dividends and interest. Trust income is excluded. This is an example from one registered account:



> *Income you received*
> Type of Income Current Month Year-to-Date (YTD)
> Interest ................ 482.76.... 9,575.36
> Dividends.............. 362.75.... 5,935.19
> Total..................... 845.5.... 15,510.55


No doubt that this type of report of income is of no value. They should exclude it or add a line showing trust & other income. But it *DOES *show interest as interest!


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

BMO has been doing this dividends-as-interest thing for many years. Long enough that the reps all know how to handle distressed calls from clients.

what about my T5s, they'll be wrong, wail the clients.

no, the T5s will be correct, the income will appear as eligible dividends, it's just on our statements that it appears wrongly as interest, say the reps.

so why don't you configure your statements correctly, go the clients.

it's easier to tell the clients to disbelieve their statements, say the reps.

.


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## Brainer (Oct 8, 2015)

Eclectic:

Well, as opposed to say, a cash payment from a HISA fund. How does one differentiate between a cash distribution and a fund distribution of more units? Are there proper terms for each?

Yeah, you'd think they'd itemize the various types of income. Maybe, like I said, they're warming up to add the other ones in soon.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Brainer said:


> Eclectic:
> 
> Well, as opposed to say, a cash payment from a HISA fund. How does one differentiate between a cash distribution and a fund distribution of more units? Are there proper terms for each?
> 
> Yeah, you'd think they'd itemize the various types of income. Maybe, like I said, they're warming up to add the other ones in soon.


Brainer,
As posted above, they DO distinguish between interest and dividends. However, you said you had a HISA? So far as I know the BMO HISAs are classified as mutual funds and mutual fund distributions would not show up as dividends or interest.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

agent99 said:


> Finally today, I called them. The agent went away and spoke to his upper level guys. Came back and read to me from an internal memo they had received. It stated that their new software had coding errors. This affected all types of income. Interest, Dividends, REIT distributions, Mutual fund distributions etc. How some of those still got into the income received, he did not know. They are apparently working on a fix, but no timeline for completion.
> 
> Scary part, is that I think he said that the same system will produce the T-slips this year!



i only have one holding where the BMO reporting is effed up due to the above-mentioned coding errors. It's a unit trust with eligible dividends, but these are reported on statements - also in web account - as interest. It's been going on for years.

re the tax slips, what BMO has always told me is that the T5s will be correct, although the particular representative offering this information also said she was aware that the statements look alarming & many clients have complained.

my experience is that the representative was right, the T5s are correct (ie they are based on another system thank goodness), but the statements continue to look alarming.

.


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## Brainer (Oct 8, 2015)

Wait, wait...Agent99, you have an interest row/category under the "Income You Received" section? Cause I don't. Just dividends. Or did you mean they distinguish in another way?


"I told you not to tell me that, chief".




agent99 said:


> Brainer,
> As posted above, they DO distinguish between interest and dividends. However, you said you had a HISA? So far as I know the BMO HISAs are classified as mutual funds and mutual fund distributions would not show up as dividends or interest.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Brainer said:


> Wait, wait...Agent99, you have an interest row/category under the "Income You Received" section? Cause I don't. Just dividends. Or did you mean they distinguish in another way?
> .


Read,read, read..... (earlier posts)


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## Eclectic12 (Oct 20, 2010)

Brainer said:


> .... Well, as opposed to say, a cash payment from a HISA fund ...


The HISA MFs that pay units instead of cash are a strange beast.

That said ... I don't understand. The "Income" section of that report that has a "dividend" label is according to the rep, only dividends yet the HISA supposedly describing the interest paid as "dividends".

Are both showing on the income report or is the HISA label coming from other literature?

For the HISA MFs, I'd prefer the new units that are paying the interest to be listed as "distributions". That way one knows it is not a pure dividend (i.e. 100% interest) plus one knows to look for an increase in the number of units as the payout.




Brainer said:


> .... How does one differentiate between a cash distribution and a fund distribution of more units? Are there proper terms for each?


Clearly there are not good definitions otherwise investors would not be sucked into believing they are receiving dividends that a T5 will take care of when there is a mix (plus possibly subtractions or additions to the cost base).

I have to think about it but I'm not sure I want unit distributions listed under "income" as I think of it as cash paid. The HISA MFs however, are paying cash that results in more units so I can where some would want this type of income listed.




Brainer said:


> ... Yeah, you'd think they'd itemize the various types of income. Maybe, like I said, they're warming up to add the other ones in soon.


Time will tell .... though I tend to ignore the "income/gains" reports versus my spreadsheet that tracks costs, units etc.


Cheers


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## GreatLaker (Mar 23, 2014)

Eclectic12 said:


> The HISA MFs that pay units instead of cash are a strange beast.


Yes they are... and they cause a lot of confusion. Here is my view on TDB8150 which is TDDI's HISA that is always priced at $10.00/"unit":

The price of TDB8150 is always $10, so the ACB/share is always $10. It can not have a capital gain or loss. It is really a savings account product you can hold in a TDDI account, but it must be purchased like mutual fund units since that's how TDDI systems work. No need to track ACB for TDB8150. 

Consider if you had an EQ bank savings account paying 2%. You deposit $1000, so you are (effectively) purchasing 1000 "units" at a price of $1/unit. Then after a year you have earned 20 "units" of interest. You now have 1020 units at a price of $1/unit, which you withdraw, so (effectively) you are selling 1020 units for a total of $1020, $1000 of which is your original deposit and $20 of which is interest. No capital gain or loss, so no ACB to worry about. (For simplicity, this ignores that interest compounds monthly.) 

Thinking about it that way, TDB8150 is not that different from a regular savings account except the "price" is $10 instead of $1.​


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## Eclectic12 (Oct 20, 2010)

^^^^

I wasn't thinking so much of the mechanics as the reporting. Most people are used to a report that identifies they were paid $x in interest. As identified, the HISA MF is similar but how it gets identified may vary.


Cheers


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## Brainer (Oct 8, 2015)

Agent:

I did read them. Several times. They're not clear to me. Maybe you can clarify...Do you have a row/subheading in that section other than
dividends?




agent99 said:


> Read,read, read..... (earlier posts)


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Brainer said:


> Agent:
> 
> I did read them. Several times. They're not clear to me. Maybe you can clarify...Do you have a row/subheading in that section other than
> dividends?


I posted this in post #18.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Regarding the December Statement. I today spoke to someone who had actually looked at what had happened. 

- He told me that due to a programming error, the only income included in the income summary part of the December report, was the dividend income from non-Canadian securities.
- He said that they could not re-run the December report, but would send me a spreadsheet report that is correct.
- He said that the error was corrected for the January report and that their reports now included Canadian dividends

They are aware that the income reported does not include income from trusts and etfs. They are working on it but no implementation date yet. Thinking of adding a 3rd line below dividends and interest for "other" income which of course could include various classifications of income including ROC. So this would be different from what we eventually see on T3's and T5's.

He understood my frustration in using MyLink for communication and had gone over all the reponses. Most of which showed that the agent did not understand the basic problem. Which was simply - How did my 2016 Total Income go from $10k+ in November to $72 in December! He admitted that others have also had problems with MyLink communications

I think I am done with this. Hopefully it results in better reports and better MyLink communications. In general, I have been happy overall with BMOIL. But not usually with MyLink!


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