Early adopter bonus - is it taxable? (Z)

According to Zopa's FAQ, early adopter bonus is taxable:  www.zopa.com/help/article/what-do-hmrc-say-about-what-i-need-to-declare

That's an interesting thought. The thing that worries me most now that there is less visibility of things at the detail level is that if they are making a pigs ear of this simple thing in my view then what are they making of the more important stuff.

As an ex developer and designer in the comms business this stinks of documentation and testing flaws but who am i to comment on something i can see a lot less of now. I have reported so many issues to them I think they are just ignoring much of what I am reporting or worse not even bothering anymore. If and when I take all the problems to the FCA its barely going to cost them a days wage for their trouble and to be honest the FCA is already considered pretty much a joke in these areas anyway.

Anyway we'll see, i've reported this to them but their usual stance is that the statements are not that important if they are wrong as the backend has all the correct info trouble is it doesn't always work there correctly either as i have learnt in the past.   

Edit: I've just remembered the latest thing with the statements bonuses are that they are using this to fix data that is months old in their statements we can see or more likely their redesigned backend made the mistake and its been planted in the latest month instead of being recorded in the correct month as was the case in the past. it was more obvious in the old days when the monthly statements came in as I always pulled the statements as they were delivered and in order to be able to spot anomalies record them and their totals as it was easier to spot discrepancies caused by old missed data. I'm guessing they have a table or tables where the data is stored similar to my method and the statements are recorded in a table which won;t change unless they run a rebuild on the new statements. This means that they have to record months old errors in the latest statement as a bonus entry to make the monthlies statement make sense. Just my take though i could be wrong. They may have done this to give the build processes a bit of slack and also save a considerable amount of time/resource.

Hmmmm. But although I’ve never had any cashback my taxable bonus is £40 less than my total “early adopter” bonus.

I'm still living in hope they have redefined the bonus so it is no longer taxable.  

I was monitoring mine with a fine tooth comb as zopa last 2 months had stated they were having issues with the bonus - i think someone forgot to run it or worse it needed some fine tuning to get it working. so I purposely recorded my entries daily - to be fair i have been dragging money out and tracking daily for a while now. so i looked at the updates on 26th then the 27th - did get some bonus items but nothing that resembled EAB's (I sort of calculate that loosly each month too.) so as soon as the email came yesterday i immediately went to the system and checked what the most recent bonuses were. I matched up the 2 i received directly with the total of the email amount and i can state categorically that these value were marked as bonus:other (non taxable)

I wrote to them as soon as this happened but sadly they will probably take about 7 week days to respond on it. In my check of the latest tax pdf today the bonuses are recorded but the only taxable earning to declare is relative to loan interest. 

Edit: Actually i've just rechecked my 20/21 tax document and the EAB is definitely taxed its the only bonus I have and in the new statements its not marked as non taxable. This year the EAB is marked as not taxable and the tax pdf agrees its not. As i say i have reported this to them but fixes seem to take weeks once an error is found and to be fair this does not really have to be fixed until next April. They seem to also not be that interested in the confusion this and other aspects of the new layouts is throwing up.

I have only queried their indicators for 21/22 so far but their notion of the missed EAB is somewhat confused i feel. I am working with one of the support team leads on the new statements and most of it was the alignment with the data I had from the old statements they used to have that i had recorded since 2015. I could see huge missing items in their new ones so it's taken quite a while and they eventually realised they had some holes that needed to be shored up - fixed or worse completed!. 

The other major issue I have still outstanding with them, I have the FCA 8 week clock running on it, is the missing data for the days they decided to drop so called completed stuff probably due to the delays of the transfer to the new platform/system - its probably also the reason they failed on the EAB's for Feb and Mar too they seemed to know about it but were a bit cagey. In my data there are half a dozen loans that were active up to early feb but suddenly went missing from their new loanbook data - which to all intents and purposes is the old alltime loanbook but with all loans that were no longer not active on day one missing - that's what they said anyway but their answer for that was somewhat flawed regarding finished loans according to some of my closed loans prior to the flip still being there. Thing is though they have so far been unable to tell me why they were closed but I know that Natasha Weir has suggested to the guy i am dealing with that we should still be able to see any data we wish to but not sure at what level this - ideally for me the old detailed monthly csv statements would make life much better for me but i think that one is a lost cause now.

I'm still waiting despite me having supplied old borrower id's for the lost loans - they had very kindly supplied me translations for all the current loans in the loanbook and i back translated them thing is though they don't even seem to understand that the old borrower id is a text field so their translations came with numbers rather than text entries. They had to go round the loop a few times with that one. 

My worry is that those lost loans may never come back - i do still have the last integrations i did with my system including the old alltime and current loanbooks for our 4 accounts. gong forwards I'm going to take copies of the current loanbook on the last day of the month so i may be able to see at least the month any loans closed in. In my current and alltime data i have integrated the last payment day from the old statements that sadly i cannot see anymore but the month closure may be useful going forward.

Sorry this has turned into war an peace but it may be useful to some people perhaps. My overriding concern is that if the front end has been so flawed and it still is to degree what on earth has happened in the back end where all our transactions and funds truly lie.