Fire Up the Shredder!
May 1, 2024 7:30 am
By Donya Parrish, MCU VP Risk Management
If you’ve ever been part of a discussion at your credit union on record retention, you know there is frustration with some of the timeframes in NCUA’s guidelines. “Permanent” sounds reasonable until you start to think about some of our credit unions having been open for almost 90 years. What could you possibly need to research in board minutes or audit reports from all those years ago? Any action that might have been needed that they would have supported is likely long gone.
Now shift to thinking about what format to save all those records in and you start to see another challenge. Paper records take up valuable space, have the potential to be destroyed easily, and are cumbersome to research unless they are well-catalogued. Any storage with an electronic means becomes dependent on the technology to view or reproduce it. We are in a digital world in 2024, but it was not that long ago that floppy discs and microfiche were the standard. How will you ensure you can view or reproduce records from those eras — or even from this time period — as digital standards continue to evolve?
NCUA recently solicited feedback on how the agency can update its records retention regulations and guidance. America’s Credit Unions is requesting your thoughts on some specific questions that will assist its advocacy team in helping NCUA make adjustments that could benefit all of you in the future. I would encourage you to give it some thought in the context of your credit union and the burden or cost the current regulation might be unnecessarily placing on you.
This won’t solve the issue of the employee who wants to save everything, or the “put it in the basement and forget it” philosophy, but if we can provide some meaningful input to NCUA’s process, maybe we can avoid having to pay to convert those old files.
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