It's stupid to be anything but factual. In the event of any dispute with your broker defendent's exhibit one will be the new account form. If it contains lies your dead. If you employer requires trade copies or has restrictions you circumvent it could move from stupid to criminal. There is no backpedaling here. At best it's stupid
When I filled out a new account with TDA, they asked for my employer's address, zip code and my home address. As well as my mailing address. I gave them my mailing address (post office box) as a home address. And 2,3 days later I got an email message from Compliance saying my application was on hold until I verified my address. I told them I lived at my mailing address but they have some way of typing in our addresses and determining if it is valid. There is an apartment complex next door as well as an office complex but they figured it out. I wasn't trying to be deceptive, I just did not want any mail going to my home address because I don't use my mailbox here. I had to change it. Those guys are good.....
I don't really understand how employment status would make sign-up difficult. Don't retired people open brokerage accounts? It's not the broker's job to assess financial security. Also, I was not aware that my broker withholds profit for taxes, but maybe that's because I've never tried to withdraw my full account value. My broker doesn't know my tax liabilities. Technically, one should be allowed to use the full profits from one trade to fund the next.
Contrary to all the naysayers here, you can lie on your account application and get away with it. There will be some attempt to verify identity as per KYC/AML but depending on the broker, and the jurisdiction the broker is in, that could range from "please sign this form saying you are not a terrorist" to "Compliance will call your manager at 3pm".
I'm not a naysayer, I'm just telling the facts. The fact is that if you're dealing with a financial company in a "western" country, then your chances of being able to get away with lieing on your application form is pretty much zero. If you're dealing with some random broker in Africa then I don't know ... maybe, maybe not... but then you may well also find your funds might disappear one day ! Look, its simple. We live in an era of "big-data". The financial services industry has access to very powerful databases to help them with their KYC/AML compliance. The financial services industry also engages in information sharing, so if you get red-flagged somewhere because of a KYC/AML suspicion, you are soon going to find it very hard to open accounts anywhere and you might find existing accounts suddenly get frozen. Don't lie to the compliance department of a financial services organisation, they can make your life a living hell.
I've never heard of financial institutions sharing data to each other about their clients for obvious client retention issues. I think you may be biased.
I'm not biased. Industry sharing of fraud, fraud-risk and other KYC/AML data is a fact. There are very strict confidentiality and security requirements on it for the very reasons you mention, hence the reason you may not have heard of it. Its on a "need to know" basis and the information should never go further than the compliance department.
So do you have the name of at least 1 company that facilitates sharing with each other ? I work in a hedge fund and none of our back-office/compliance guy is aware of anything like that, so if it does exist, we'd be interested in having a look at it