Articles

•         Litigation – Still the number one reason organizations go out of business!  There is no question that the United States is the most litigious country in the world.  You need to maintain business records that support your business decisions, your operations and your treatment of individuals for the length of time required by agencies regulating your business, and, as dictated by the statutes of limitations for someone to bring a claim against you.
•         Corporate Image – information breaches lead to a lack of confidence in your customer base and often lead to class action lawsuits
•         Communication – a Records Management Program covers the how to’s:

•        Cost Control – If you don’t need it for legal, regulatory or operational reasons, why keep it? 

•         Improved Customer Service – When you keep only the most active records close by or online, retrieval time to look up a customer question or address a complaint takes seconds or minutes instead of hours and days. 

•         “Failure to adopt a compliant records retention and destruction protocol that permits cost effective access to relevant records and creates an audit trail subjects the non-compliant litigant to sanctions and constitutes spoliation”

Implementing a records program after you’ve been in business for a few years (or more) is, undoubtedly, expensive to do initially.  Not having it is expensive for the life of your company with year after year of increasing costs to store, search through and respond to litigation, audits, and requests to remove personally identifiable information.