I read your article online about a couple selling Bank of Ireland shares and wondering about capital gains.
My wife worked in Bank of Ireland from 1976 to 1991 and got shares in lieu of bonus and dividends. We have lots of paperwork but difficulty in seeing what she actually paid for the share. Any advice?
Mr P.H.
It’s something that we never really think about at the time, the need to keep track of things like when we received or bought shares and when we sold them.
Dividends are different because they count as income and therefore should be declared to Revenue at the end of every tax year. But it really is only when we look to sell shares that many people realise they need the purchase data – when and for how much – in order to establish what, if any, capital gains tax (CGT) liability they have.
I’m always surprised that people who actively choose to invest don’t understand the need for such paperwork but this situation is different. Your wife is clearly an accidental investor who took advantage of an opportunity in her workplace.
That’s not going to make the job any easier really, given how far back we are looking here.
Bank shares were blue-chip back then in the days when the financial crash was a scenario that not even the most pessimistic shareholder could foresee.
They had two advantages. First, they tended to rise in value over time, allowing for the temporary setbacks that are inevitable with any listed company. Second, they were reliable sources of dividends, making them attractive to investors who were looking for some income as well as capital appreciation over time.
I contacted the bank, with your permission, and they did go looking back in their files to see if they could identify how many shares you would have received in lieu of bonus over the years that such a scheme was available.
However, they have run up against a brick wall, ironically with a piece of legislation that was designed to protect your privacy and give you more control over your own personal information – the EU’s General Data Protection Legislation (GDPR).
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Bank of Ireland tells me that, as we are talking about a period that is more than 30 years ago, “in line with our GDPR requirements we can no longer hold this information”.
But all is not lost. The bank may no longer have a record of what shares you got when but every listed company has a share registrar – a company that is responsible for keeping track of the ownership of its shares. It keeps a register of who owns what, when they acquire them and when they sell them.
In this case, the share registrar is Computershare, one of the most established and largest players in that market.
Computershare should be able to track back to when the various shares were acquired
In fairness, the bank did try to approach it for information that might assist your wife but, as they correctly point out, they will only deal directly with individual shareholders in respect of their investment, not third parties.
Like everyone these days, Computershare would prefer you to deal with them online through their Investor Centre. And, to be fair, that can be the most efficient way. However, if your wife holds only these Bank of Ireland shares and does not intend to trade otherwise, it hardly seems to be worth the hassle of acquiring yet another online login and password that will inevitably be forgotten.
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Computershare can also be contacted by phone or by letter. The phone number depends on the company in which you hold the shares. In the case of Bank of Ireland, the correct number is 01 2475414.
However, given the level of detail here, it might make more sense to put things in writing, which you can do to: Computershare Investor Services (Ireland) Limited, 3100 Lake Drive, Citywest Business Campus, Dublin 24, D24 AK82.
Interestingly in this day and age, they are not particularly keen to receive email.
Now, from what I understand, your wife does know how many shares she now holds, or at least how many she held back in the day – we’ll come back to that in a minute. What she wants to know is how many of those shares were acquired on which specific dates – and at what price.
Computershare should be able to track back to when the various shares were acquired but you want to check with them before they start if there is any charge for that exercise and, ideally, how long it will take.
A bigger issue is price. I suspect staff may have been able to buy those shares at a slightly discounted rate to the market and, for CGT purposes, that is the figure that is important. I’m not sure Computershare would have those details.
But at least when you have the date the shares were bought, you will be able to find out what the market price was on those dates by checking back on The Irish Times epaper, or possibly with the bank.
The good news, in a twisted sort of way, is that it probably does not matter in terms of CGT, as I cannot imagine any circumstances in which your wife would have such a liability.
At the end of last week, Bank of Ireland shares were trading at €11.60.
If we turn the clock back to, say, 1984, you would have paid between 283.5 pence and £4.44 for those shares over the course of that year at market rates – which translates into euro at somewhere between €3.60 and €5.63. If she was able to buy at a discount those figures would be slightly lower.
However, the shares your wife bought in the 1980s and early 1990s are very different creatures from the Bank of Ireland shares that trade today.
In 1999, the bank split each share in two so the number of shares your wife owned at that time would have doubled.
In 2017, as the bank tried to get its share register back in order following the chaos of the financial crash, it executed a share consolidation in which shareholders got one new share in Bank of Ireland for every 30 shares they held previously.
Any actual <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/your-money/2025/05/04/i-hold-paper-certificates-for-my-shares-are-these-still-valid/" target="_self" rel="" title="https://www.irishtimes.com/your-money/2025/05/04/i-hold-paper-certificates-for-my-shares-are-these-still-valid/">physical share certificates</a> that your wife holds are no longer valid as all Irish shares have, as of the start of this year, transferred to electronic form
So let’s say you bought 30 shares in 1984 at the equivalent of €3.74 each. Following the split in July 1999, you would now have 60 shares in place of these 30 shares, with each having a notional “purchase price” of €1.87.
Before the split the shares had been trading at €18.10, On the first day of trading after the split each of the divided shares was worth €9.25, so your wife was certainly well ahead on her investment at that stage.
Fast forward to 2017, and the value of those shares had collapsed to 24.6 cent before the bank’s consolidation. By giving you one share for every 30 you owned at the time, after the consolidation you now owned two shares in relation to those 30 we bought back in 1984 in our example and the notional price of each of those two shares was €56.10.
When they started trading after the consolidation, they were doing so at a price of €7.38. Compared to your rebased purchase price of €56.10, you can see how disastrously in the red this investment now was.
Since then, the shares have traded within that €5 band, closing last Friday at €11.60. They are on a rising trend but, as you can see, it will be an awful long time before your wife is even back at par, never mind about having to worry about CGT.
You would need to go through that exercise for each tranche of shares acquired in lieu of a bonus to get an accurate fix on the financial position.
That doesn’t mean their purchase price is irrelevant. If you were to sell those notional 1984 shares now, you would be at a loss of €44.50 on every one of today’s shares sold.
That capital loss can be set against gains you might make from the sale of other shares or assets. You will not have to worry about any capital gains on any sale once the loss crystallised in any sale of Bank of Ireland stock is fully offset, so it is worth making sure you track down the correct purchase price.
But at least you have the peace of mind of knowing that you’ll not need to worry about a tax bill, whatever happens.
As you’ll note from a recent reply, any actual physical share certificates that your wife holds are no longer valid as all Irish shares have, as of the start of this year, transferred to electronic form. It doesn’t change her rights: in fact, it does make things easier if and when she goes to sell any of the shares but it can be confusing for people.
Please send your queries to Dominic Coyle, Q&A, The Irish Times, 24-28 Tara Street Dublin 2, or by email to dominic.coyle@irishtimes.com with a contact phone number. This column is a reader service and is not intended to replace professional advice
