To give people quick and easy access to the finances of their deceased family, Bankers Association, Securities Investment Trust & Consulting Association (SITCA), Life Insurance Association (LIA), Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation (TDCC), Taiwan Futures Exchange (TAIFEX), and Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC) joined hands to develop One-stop Query Service for Financial Estate. National Taxation Bureau (NTB) of Taipei has partnered with these financial institutions and conducted a trial run starting from December 1, 2019. People no longer need to visit one organization after another to gather information on deposits, loans, listed equities, futures, domestic and offshore mutual funds, life insurance policies, credit cards, coffers, and credit reports after the death of their loved ones. The data are now just one application form away.

According to TDCC President Chu Han-Chiang, both the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF) strongly endorse the new service. TDCC and Taiwan Financial Services Roundtable (TFSR) mapped out the plan together. During the trial run, TDCC and TFSR adopted a rolling-review strategy to promptly and continually adjust and monitor as needed. Most applicants have made favorable comments in the past few months. Over 3,900 people had used the service before the trial run ended at the end of June 2020.

The One-stop Query Service has been officially launched at the national level on July 1, 2020. Since then, citizens can go to any NTB offices and branches to manage the finances of their departed family. In the past, applicants must go to the NTB office of the district where the decedent had registered as their permanent residence, but now applicants can choose to go to the nearest office. The new service has made the entire process much more efficient and convenient. People only need to pay a visit to one NTB office, and put a tick against the financial institutions from which they want to have the information retrieved. NTB will forward the applications to the institutions selected by applicants, and the institutions or their members will directly get back to applicants with the results within ten business days.

Mr. Chu also stated that TDCC has already established an leased line with the MOF Fiscal Information Agency (FIA) in 2017 due to some business demands back then. As One-stop Query Service is now available for the entire country, and the digital trends are encouraging digitalized and automated processes, TDCC has taken the lead to carry out a trial run with the said leased line to receive queries from NTB offices of five districts since July 1, 2020. In additional to the straight through processing service, the application files are being transferred into the system, the required information is automatically retrieved on the exact same day the requests were made. Then, applicants will receive the results on the next business day. It’s remarkably efficient, and the TDCC experience will be shared with other institutions in the future.

In addition, TDCC is working on a more convenient way for people to pay estate tax. After compiling, integrating, and optimizing relevant reports, as well as adding information on securities closing prices and the conversion prices, TDCC created a new statement exclusively for estate tax declaration. The new version of the document is not only more reader-friendly, but it also helps save people the trouble of checking all securities’ closing prices by gathering numbers from Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) and Taipei Exchange (TPEx) before doing the conversion themselves. The upgrade makes better use of available persons and time. It’s indeed a more time-efficient and effort-saving policy that is simple and useful for Taiwanese people.