Document Scanning Meeting Compliances and Retention Requirements
Compliance means adhering to a policy, regulation, specification, or standard. Businesses might comply with standards such as those produced by ISO to gain customer confidence and acceptability. However, regulatory compliance is the focus
Compliance typically involves doing specific things in certain ways and maintaining data as evidence that these have been done as required. Maintaining documents is a key component of compliance management.
Compliance requirements cover a wide range of activities, from monitoring the processes of producing and changing financial records (Sarbanes Oxley Act) and protecting individually identifiable health information (HIPAA) to the process of initiating disciplinary proceedings against employees and locating your business in non-residential areas
Sarbanes-Oxley
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act brought to the fore front the growing necessity for businesses to review and enhance their policies and practices regarding document retention. The Act further establishes the legitimacy of electronic documents, including email and deleted files, as legally admissible evidence. Compliance with the Act requires systematic policies governing document retention, archiving, and destruction.
Formerly, only accounting records, contracts and other legal documents, and the special records maintained under specific regulations were typically covered by retention requirements. However, enactments such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) have dramatically changed the scenario.
Under SOX, practically every document that comes into a business will have to be maintained for specified periods. These include e-mails, instant messages, internal memos, and other such documents that were usually destroyed to reclaim space.
Regulations like HIPAA make it compulsory to ensure privacy of personal data of customers and employees in the custody of a business. This imposes the additional burden of securing the documents against unauthorized access.
Retention of documents involves systematic archiving, keeping all the different versions, with each one an exact copy of the original document. This is different from backing up, which might involve keeping only the recent copy and is intended more as a disaster-recovery precaution than a document-retention practice.
