Big Fish and Bad Recordkeeping

We tossed a bunch of stuff into the trash from my voyage into Teen Heaven over the weekend. It seems to be the season for it, for there, this morning, was dauntless_heart, happy they could safely toss a lot of their bank records because their bank confirmed they are available in digitial format.  Yay!

Not so fast, Colonel Hogan, I replied:

Take the three to four hours it will take and download those statements onto a removable media (CD, external hard drive, even better both) and put it/them in a file/place you will remember.

 

Banks are nice about offering paperless services until they're not so nice. They merge and acquire each other like swingers at a 70s key party and the records don't always cross over. A few years ago, I had a client who in turn had another client who was being gleefully swindled by a trusted employee. Before we could sue the guy or press charges, we needed to see the "real" records of the transfers, not the fake set of books the guy had cooked. BigUglyBank NA, which had acquired Your Friendly Local S&L during the crime, threw its corporate hands up and said, oopsies, we lost those. Nothing we could do.

Also, if things go bad and you wind up closing that account or, worse, defaulting on some obligation to that bank, your access to those online records will go poof.

So today, we'll review both of those two things: paperlessness, and BigUglyBank swallowing/getting swallowed by OtherBank.

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Growing up, I learned that the Three Big Lies were:

- I love you;
- The check is in the mail; and
- I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.

As of the present, moving straight to number one with a bullet (or possibly bear spray since January 6th) is THE Big Lie that has taken its name in popular and journalistic culture: that the evicted White House Squatter actually won the election that he lost, along with the 60 lawsuits he also lost trying to deny he lost.  But, also moving way up in the countdown is the endless plea I get from banks, auto financiers and everyone else who is required to communicate with me in paper unless I opt out of getting them:

Save postage! End clutter! Never misplace a statement! Sign up for paperless notifications today!

Let's unpack that:

-You don't need to go paperless to save postage. Almost every statement generator lets you use online services to view or pay accounts without giving up paper. 

-Online clutter is just as bad as the paper kind, only harder to manage. In my comment, I mentioned the risks when a statement generator cuts off your access to past statements, accidentally or on purpose. There is also the very real risk of being locked out on your own end because a computer crashed, or you were forced to change a password on one machine and forgot to update it on another and you can't log in.  Paper bills always provide a failsafe if you have to go to a branch or ::shudder:: use the US Mail. (We had an experience with that during our refi, where they paid  three lenders we were paying off out of proceeds besides the mortgage. Because we had to use actual checks directly from the bank, I couldn't pay them online as usual. One could be paid at a local branch, but to be safe, I spent the seven bucks to mail each of the other two to their destinations. Three days later, USPS tracking wasn't even acknowledging they'd been sent, but by that day's end, each of the banks had posted the payment.)

-And online statements are just as misplaceable as the paper kind. Either by them locking you out, their system changing and not going back, or you (which is to say, me) forgetting which external drive or box of CD jewelboxes has the downloaded statements.  There's something tactile and, well, BULKIER about the paper ones that we keep in envelopes and then store in shoeboxes for 3-5 years after each year-end, that makes them harder to lose.  When we've gone virtual dumpster-diving for copies of receipts to verify warranty coverage or something similar, those shoeboxes have saved us every time.

A final legal point: you have defined legal rights to dispute or question things on statements, but your time is very limited in most cases and they require notification the old-fashioned way: by writing to them at a snail address.  Online statements may have this information,  but try making them out in a 49.7 percent reduced Abode document.

So don't believe a word of it. Now I love you, on the other hand,....

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The other way for things to go missing is during corporate transitions. I've described some of those clusters above.  Here's another war story about how those mergers, spinoffs and regurgitations have affected my business over the years.

As anyone "Upstate" will tell you, there are two distinct New Yorks. I've lived in both, and they're not as different as the oppressed Republicans would have you believe, but I get it.  Until just this decade, the GOP managed to control at least the State Senate among the "three men in a room" form of government consisting of the leader of that body, the Speaker of the State Assembly and the Guv.  The Senate had always been protective of upstate interests, and in the 1970s as I crossed from one to the other, they'd finally ended a longstanding state ban on the big Noo Yawk City banks being allowed to operate outside their immediate metro area counties.  When I first visited my sister in Binghamton in the early 70s, I was surprised to see none of the familiar names from our corner plazas and standalone branches: Citibank, Chase, Manny Hanny were nowhere to be seen. By the time I moved to Ithaca, the Lej had allowed the big boys to gain toeholds in the farflung flyover portions of the state, but they required them to operate them as separate entities from their too-big-to-fail downstate selves.

The banks did this in different ways. Chase Manhattan took its big move into Western and Central New York by buying a Rochester-based bank called Lincoln First, but it was rebranded as Chase Lincoln First and run out of Lincoln Tower separately from the Manhattan end of the bank.  Another white-shoe Wall Street lender named Irving Trust similarly bought up trust companies in Rochester and near Binghamton, keeping them under their Endicott and Central Trust names and separately identified from Irv. In the late 80s, Irving took three slugs to the belly and exited retail banking; those Centrals and Endicotts became parts of M&T, one of the few remaining upstate-headquarted banks still in existence.

And then there was the benefactor of my future ballpark. Citibank came to upstate towns fresh, opening branches under their own brand, which looked just like Noo Yawk Citis but were legally identified as a separate entity known as Citibank (New York State). I know this from having probably brought close to 1,000 lawsuits for them between 1985 and 1994.  They had their own local hierarchy, with bank presidents headquartered in downtown Rochester several floors above us in a building ironically named for a competing savings and loan. But my point-of-contact clients were all over the suburbs in rented office parks until they built their own fancy HQ building in suburban Bushnell's Basin. 

In the very early 90s, the bank's local muckeymucks told us about their new deep dive into the latest technology. All collections would now be referred and reported through a dedicated computer system called RecoveryOne. A greenscreen CRT terminal was installed in a back corner of our office, connected through a bitchin' 4800 baud modem to a dedicated data line that kept us permanently connected to the collectors and their supervisors.  There were the usual F-bombs to be hurled: F1 for help, F3 for notes, F5 for account activity, and so. I can't remember if the bank, the firm or both undertook the cost of hooking us up, but the bank itself must've sunk hundreds of thousands into putting these beasts in every one of their affiliated collection partners' offices, as well as on every desk at a very large operations center....

one which, barely two years later, would no longer exist.

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Somewhere lost in memory and history, the "separate subsidiary" requirement went by the wayside. By the end of the century, Chase had completely de-Lincolnized its upstate operations and were entirely the same bank they were in Manhattan. They also left Buffalo around this time, where Lincoln First had never built a branch network; M&T took their few local locations over.  Irving had also left the town at first sun. Citibank, meanwhile, began the internal merger process slowly; its branches and accounts remained in the NYS subsidiary until the time I stopped representing them in 1994, but they shut down the upstate collections operations a few years before that, transferring them to a regional center run out of a converted parochial school just off the Taconic Parkway in Pelham, just north of the Bronx where hijacked subway trains of that name originate.

I was sent on a mission of mercy- to get these strange new Citibankers with funny accents to take mercy on us and keep using us for their collections and locally originated foreclosures.  I drove down one cold winter morning, found the former school, and met Carol my contact for a tour and a sitdown.  Pelham was more crowded but less spacious than the fancier new digs they'd just built and moved out of. All the collectors and managers sounded busy and I saw them keying data into terminals that looked like, but not QUITE like, the one we had zipping along at 4800 in our back room.

Are these running RecoveryOne, Carol?, I asked.

The resulting frowny face and the two-word answer matched:

Oh. THAT.

If you started rereading the original Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy on Tuesday, as well you should have for it being Towel Day, you would have learned where the local council stored the plans for demolition of Arthur Dent's home:

“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”

THAT, pretty much, is where Pelham had hooked up their one and only RecoveryOne monitor, connected to a dozen outside firms and hundreds of empty desks. They may have put one of these on it-


-to prevent any accidental human contact.  I left that building late that morning, and that firm not long after, so I've no idea what became of the senseless waste of cathode rays that went into that whole business. I cannot find any trace of RecoveryOne (or Recovery1, in case I'm remembering wrong) in Internetland that would suggest what a boondoggle that was.  Meanwhile, by 2006, Citibank had completely retreated from the upstate market, save for a few back-office operations in Buffalo I occasionally see a notice from. Their branches were all sold to, who else?, M&T.

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