I’ll assert that there are laws requiring us to keep financial records for 5, 7, and 10 years. Different laws for different kinds of records. In no case is it “indefinitely”: all of the laws and regulations we comply with are quite definite.
Yes and no. The physical records belong to the practitioner. You are legally entitled to a copy, but the practitioner is allowed to charge a reasonable fee for the copy.
If you grab your chart from a staffer’s hand and run out the door with it you can be charged with theft (I’ve seen it happen in an optometrist’s office I used to work at).
I don’t really think that banks should have to provide access to records once a person closes their account, but your post is a bundle of contradictions and non-sequiturs.
You say that if the former customer needs statements, they can get them, but for a price. This contradicts your earlier suggestion that you don’t keep the information around. If a person can pay you to provide the information, then you obviously have it somewhere. It’s not like you eliminate it completely when they drop their account.
Storage space costs money? Give me a break. I know it costs money, but the fact that you keep people’s records suggests that paying for storage space is not really the main issue.
And the database issue is hilarious. I understand that databases can be slowed down by extra information, but the databases maintaining bank customer records must surely be massive relational databases with dozens (perhaps hundreds) of tables, and must contain tables with millions of lines of data. I really doubt that keeping or discarding the data of closed accounts makes much of a difference. If those databases run slow, it’s probably more an issue of overall database optimization problems than the presence of a few thousand or even tens of thousands of former customers in the database.
Not only that, but if i can, in fact, get my records for a fee (as you suggested in your post), then surely my information must still be there in the database anyway, right? I mean, if a former customer calls and requests statements, and is willing to pay for them, are you telling me that you send some office boy down into the basement to flick through thousands of folders in filing cabinets? Of course not. You look up the former customer in your database, find the information that he or she needs, and send it for a fee.
Again, as i said at the start, i don’t believe that banks and other private institutions should be required to maintain free access to this stuff for non-customers. I have no real problem with a bank charging a former customer for paperwork. But at least spare us the technological difficulty argument.
In the case of some utility companies, the service address is coupled to the current account, so by moving away you effectively surrender any access to that account. Conceivably they could continue to give you access by moving your account to expired status, but it’s understandably not a huge priority for them.
I work for a large cellphone company that does this. As far as I can tell, it’s mostly a technical issue – online accounts are linked at the root level to an active service number. If you don’t have an active number, there’s no “identity” for the account. A prior number wouldn’t be enough, because numbers get reassigned.
It’s substantially cheaper for customers to use online access rather than calling in, so I think it would make sense to allow access, but I’m sure it’s a low priority fix and it’s possible they want customers to call so we have an extra “save” attempt. I’ve never heard anybody advocating that, though.
It’s not technological difficulty in the sense that the actual technology or hardware requirements are difficult. It’s that the system design didn’t account for it because it wasn’t a priority then, so now it can’t be done (without redesigning the system. And guess what, it still isn’t a priority).
When they sold whatever executive was in charge of the process on how much money they’d save not mailing bills to everyone, someone brought up this issue about whether they’d continue to provide access to people who close their accounts. I’m sure of it. And the executive said “to hell with that. That won’t save us any money and it will require some amount of developer time and hardware time and it’s not coming out of my budget.”
Never suggested otherwise.
But if you scroll up the page, and have a look at the person i was replying to, you will see that the person in question was making assertions about storage space and database speed. That’s quite different from what you’re talking about.
Sometimes, to save money, companies stored current info on disk, and older info on magnetic tape (or other media where retrieval isn’t immediate). So there could be some data that’s accessible if you want to wait a few hours for somebody to load up the tape (and pay some fee), but isn’t available online any more.
It’s possible that for modern systems, it’s not worth the bother of setting up offline storage unless you’re dealing with vast amounts of data, more than just billing records, say high resolution medical scans. But it made sense in the past, and many companies aren’t going to redesign their processes just because hard drives got cheaper.
Garrrrrgh. There are still companies with systems like this? I had hoped that they had all gone bust and been flushed out of existance because of their inadequate and hopeless financial systems. (I can name a few where I know that has happened).
One of the now-gone companies was a bank where I closed my accounts after they got one mixed up with a different customer, and didn’t care. Where their systems used to crash for a couple of hours several times a year. Where when I closed my accounts, they failed to pay outstanding interest because they didn’t have an address for me, because the account was closed.
Incompetence is no excuse: beyond a certain level, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I work for a financial services company where it is simply standard practice to remove accounts from online view once they are closed. But on request, we can make them available again for free. Have you tried asking the companies in question if they will do this?