The money transfer app this week contacted roughly 4,000 U.K. users of its Wise Asset service to inform them it had given them incorrect tax statements between 2021 and 2025, the Financial Times (FT) reported Thursday (Oct. 8).
According to an email seen by the FT, Wise said it was in discussions with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the U.K.’s tax authority, about a “bulk settlement” to address any shortfall in taxes resulting from the error, caused by a third-party supplier. The company said it would compensate customers who had overpaid.
Wise said the issue was connected to miscalculations made by its third-party software on the amounts people had earned from their stocks and fund investments. This led the 4,000 or so users to be issued incorrect capital gains and income figures to declare in their self-assessment tax returns.
Not everyone who received an incorrect tax statement would have paid the wrong amount of tax, it added, due to changes in customers’ personal circumstances.
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“Wise identified that errors in software used by a third-party provider led to incorrect tax statements for a limited number of customers using our Wise Interest and Stocks investment products,” the company said in a statement to PYMNTS.
“We have fixed the issue, issued corrected statements to affected customers and are proactively redressing potential liabilities, with no ongoing risk to customers.”
The company indicated it had discovered the software failure through in-house quality controls, investigated and reported the issue, and was now handling payments to HMCR.
As the FT notes, the error is the latest issue for Wise in a year that has seen the company face scrutiny over its money laundering controls and compliance functions. News broke in June that Belgian authorities were probing the company over potential money laundering offenses and whether its accounts were used by criminal groups.
Wise has said that roughly a third of its staff is focused on financial crime prevention, that it holds more than 80 regulatory licenses, and that it faces the “reality of increasingly sophisticated bad actors attempting to exploit our platform, and we continually invest in tech-enabled systems and teams to stay ahead of ever-evolving threats.”
In July, Wise said it would submit a new application for a U.S. national trust bank charter after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) denied the application it submitted more than a year ago.
The OCC said the denial came because Wise had not addressed deficiencies in its Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) program or shown that it would be able to comply with additional AML/CFT requirements applied to banks.
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