Originally Posted by
Sam Bee
I've been working my brain and I cannot work out why HMRC would need your locators, or why you would need to supply them? And also that they would actually keep a list of them and compare them?
I think i'm most worried that i've been submitting incorrect information and might be due a compliance check
I submit a single spreadsheet of travel (not just flights) to support my tax return, the locator is a key down one side of the pivot table, so if you click on the Down Arrow it then sorts the locator. I suspect someone did that and noticed that I appear to have claimed the same flight twice, or entered a pivot query. I don't need to supply a PNR, or even a spreadsheet, but obviously it helps me and them keep on track of it all. Plus, some countries need a list of all the countries you have visited in the last x years (USA, Russia, Belarus) and so it's best I retain this information.
Originally Posted by
waffle
The exact odds depend on how randomly the record locators are distributed and how many possibilities there really are, but assuming that there are 36⁶ = 2.18 billion possible record locators, the odds that two of them are the same seem to be:
It's less than 34⁶, which is 1.5 billion, there's no 0 or 1, and with all the other restrictions I suspect the total combinations possible will be much lower still.