"HOUSTON V. HOUSTON ET AL." CONTINUED
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Well I had no intention of picking up the phone and calling CRA to discuss my Royal Bank personal
chequing account. Telling me to call CRA about a bank problem is about the same as saying call a
florist when you need your carburetor replaced. What's CRA going to say? Yeah you owe us
money but we can't help you with a bank problem. Bye. This crisis may have been triggered by
CRA, sure CRA has no place discussing my tax account with Royal Bank, they shouldn't be poking
banks with instructions they can't follow, but foremost this was a bank compliance problem, and
secondly a CRA problem. Royal Bank shouldn't be blindly helping the government harass people.
My first priority was to get my hands on the documentation Royal Bank was citing to confiscate my
funds. Once I had the document I could chip away at it. It would surely be non-compliant. I
assumed the bank had likely been served one of those Requirement to Pay forms, not a court order.
I didn't know for sure. I wrote a letter dated December 17, 2007 to the manager demanding that
Royal Bank remit a copy of the court order to my attention. I also asked that if there indeed is an
actual genuine order of the court, Royal Bank do exactly what it says. Interpret the order literally. I
reiterated that Royal Bank must follow its instructions precisely. I also asked when exactly the
funds in the account would be remitted to CRA and I told the manager I'd require a receipt proving
the payment had been made.
The manager replied by e-mail the same day. Again she referred me to the CRA employee. She
didn't want anything to do with the problem. Take it somewhere else. She tried to shoo me from
her branch, instructing me to take up my concerns with a Royal Bank branch other than hers. What
a joke. Powell River, BC is a tiny isolated community accessible only by sea and air, it might as
well be an island, and the branch is the only one in the region. As the only Royal Bank
representative for Powell River, BC where I reside, the manager had an obligation to assist me with
my bank account problems. Her e-mail didn't tell me when a payment would be made to CRA. Of
course it didn't. That was because there's no court judgment that requires Royal Bank to confiscate
funds from my account and remit a payment to CRA on my behalf.
Giving up was not an option. Procedure for a matter like this isn't complicated. At least it shouldn't
be. It's a game, it's a dance, it's a tennis match. It's Atari Pong. To seize a client account a bank
has a duty to (a) have legal paperwork in place and (b) be able to show the legal paperwork it's
acting on. If they don't have paperwork in place then the bank can't tamper with the account. The
moment I stepped into her office the manager should have been able to instantly pull the court order
out of her top drawer and place it on the desk for me to read. She should have had a copy ready
for me to take with me when I showed up at the bank as I inevitably was going to do. The bank
says there's an order, I ask for the order, the bank produces the order. Then I tell the bank why it
can't comply with the order. I tear the order to shreds. At least that's how it works when you're
dealing with civilized people.
The branch manager's resistance left me no choice but to get more aggressive. A second letter, this
one dated December 21, was prepared and deployed. I demanded disclosure of the court order
before the close of business Friday, December 28 or I'd report her and the bank to the authorities,
including to the cops. A recounting of this matter would be posted on the Internet describing the
manager's obfuscation and Royal Bank's participation in the theft of my money. I threatened a civil
lawsuit and I told her to get help from upper Royal Bank management if the matter was too much
for her to handle, which it appeared to be. Stop pointing the finger at the government, I said. I
informed her I'd contacted Canada Revenue Agency and CRA confirmed it had not served a court
order on Royal Bank. I told her that CRA confirmed it had not procured a court order that in any
way restricts my access to my Royal Bank chequing account. There is no court order that restrains
me from making a withdrawal from my bank account. There is no court order that instructs Royal
Bank to put a hold on my account. A copy of the letter was sent to Gordon M. Nixon, RBC's
President and C.E.O.
Royal Bank altered its mode of attack on Christmas Eve. On December 24 the bank decided to
disclose the documentation Royal Bank was citing to confiscate my account. Did they actually have
a court order? Nope. They had nothing. They might as well have given me a blank piece of paper.
Ten days it took Royal Bank to remit the document when it should only have taken no more than a
day. On December 11 the Vancouver, BC CRA employee delivered a Requirement to Pay form to
a 1025 West Georgia Street, Vancouver branch of Royal Bank of Canada. It was this December
11, 2007 Requirement to Pay document the bank manager says allows Royal Bank to confiscate all
the money I have to my name. However, if you read the document you can easily discern that
Royal Bank hadn't followed its instructions. While the document is an attachment order, it's not an
attachment to my bank account, it's an attachment to all those payments I receive from Royal
Bank's 1025 West Georgia Street branch. I don't receive payments from the 1025 West Georgia
Street branch. I don't receive payments from Royal Bank at all. Royal Bank couldn't comply with
it. Royal Bank can't take action pursuant to the document at all. The bank had a legal obligation to
take no action. It's unlawful for a bank to misuse a federal government document to cover up
misconduct. Then Royal Bank sunk even deeper into the fraud hole.
Attached to the Requirement to Pay form was a bank account statement. The statement shows that
on December 19 Royal Bank flushed out the account. Cleaned me right out. For no known reason.
Royal Bank undertook these actions after I alerted the branch manager to the problem and after I
instructed Royal Bank to comply precisely with all government instructions. The bank went on the
attack, trying vigorously to repel me. Royal Bank withdrew $6,872.88 placing the account balance
at zero. Then on December 20 Royal Bank did it again. Royal Bank flushed out the account a
second time. A direct deposit payment of $602.26 by Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was immediately
lifted from the account leaving a zero cash balance. The hold Royal Bank placed on the account
didn't block deposits, it only blocked me from making withdrawals. The hold didn't block Royal
Bank from tampering with the account either. A move like that against a customer is extremely
underhanded and very hard to understand. The account statement does not say where the missing
money went. I have no idea who received my cash. This is blatant theft. These actions are totally
illegal. I'd been hit with two occurrences of theft: A theft over $5,000.00 and another theft under
$5,000.00. Royal Bank should know that this is criminal activity. There is no court order that
instructs Royal Bank to withdraw the proceeds of every deposit in my personal chequing account.
There is no court order that instructs Royal Bank to remit every deposit in my personal chequing
account, no matter who it's from, to a third party, the Receiver General included.
And it had been concretely established that Royal Bank lied about the existence of a court order.
There was no court order. Victimized by the court order con once again. This time it was an illegal
seizure of a personal account. Never been hit this way before. This was one of those of attacks
that came out of nowhere, nailing me out-of-the-blue when and where I least expected it. In the
thirty or so years I've been a bank customer I've never had a personal bank account seized before.
I've had plenty of corporate accounts illegally confiscated. Never a personal chequing account.
Seizing a personal chequing account is a serious act of aggression, a major financial strike. It's a
move only inflicted on an enemy. You want to shut somebody's business down? You take away
their working capital. Cutting off the funds required to function normally in our money-based
society would throw anyone into a financial emergency. It's an assassination shot designed to
cripple an adversary. While probably not fatal, it'll cause serious short term disarray for the target.
I like being able to buy food. What made it an exceptionally deep cut was that it was so unusually
vicious, striking so close to home. It felt sinister. The government was practically knocking on my
door. Far too close for comfort. And for pennies. On December 11 when the attachment order
went into effect there was a grand total of $900 in my account. Nine hundred dollars. Why would
the government illegally access a bank account and expose itself as lawless for nine hundred bucks?
Is the government that desperate for cash? It was a gang attack by the federal government and its
bully bank. The bank was doing the bidding of the government of Canada. They couldn't have
kneed me any harder if they broke into my home and robbed me or deliberately ran me down with a
truck. I felt like I'd been mugged and had my life savings stolen. Royal Bank emerged as another
bankrupt poverty row financial institution undertaking the court order con as an enforcement
measure for the government of Canada. I was watching Royal Bank transform into a government
weapon before my eyes. Like the giant monsters in the movie Transformers, Royal Bank mutated
from a seemingly benign place to cash a cheque into a malicious asset seizure machine blindly doing
the federal government's illegal dirty work. Like the transformations of TD and BMO, RBC
emerged as Godzilla King of the Monsters on the attack. You think TD and BMO are bad, well
say hello to the godfather of all bank pricks, I'd like you to meet Mr. Gordon M. Nixon, President
and Chief Executive Officer of RBC Financial Group.
On a lonely and frightfully cold New Year's Eve I wrote to the branch manager informing her that
since Royal Bank wasn't able to come up with the court order it steadfastly claimed froze my
account, the bank must refund the cash it stole. I laid out a time-line of Royal Bank's misconduct
starting with the five thousand dollar deposit. The time-line would form the basis of a lawsuit
against the bank. I also took a close look at the three terms on the Requirement to Pay form Royal
Bank was required to comply with and explained why Royal Bank could ignore the notice
altogether. Royal Bank was given until Friday, January 11, 2008 to close the account and remit a
cheque for the stolen money or I'd sue. I gave them ample time to take a second look at the
lawlessness of their actions. The choice was theirs. A copy was carboned to RBC's C.E.O. On
January 2 I fired off a criminal fraud complaint against CRA and Royal Bank to the Financial Crime
Section of the City of Vancouver Police Department.
Then things got even weirder with Ol' Roy.