Treatment of Scrip Dividends

I have used them for almost 10 years now and overall I am quite satisfied but there is one area - dividends - which frustrates me beyond words and all attempts to get them to resolve thess issues have been met with a blank refusal.

When opening a MarketMaster account one is required to elect to either have dividends paid in cash or use the Dividend Reinvestment programme.

A simple software code would suffice to differentiate between these two options, share by share, at the point of purchase or even subsequently, would provide a superior service.

Even worse is Barclay's steadfast refusal to notify holders of any details regarding scrip dividends other than the amount of any residual cash remaining after the transaction. When queried on this the response has been that scrip details are provided annually in the Consolidated Tax statement.

Apart from the fact that the emphasis is on the word 'consolidated' it is useless for the purposes of calculating subsequent Capital Gains and, again, it would not take a programming genius much work to code the information and generate a summary of the Scrip price.

They refuse to include BAE Systems in the Dividend Reinvestment programme for reasons of "national security" and further refuse to supply a list of companies to which this also applies.

Other then that the service is fit for purpose.