The Corporate Grail

Today, technology to support document handling for compliance and privacy is no longer a nice-to-have infrastructure; it is a need-to-have one. In response, companies are revisiting their document and retention policies based on the compliance requirements that directly impact them. Mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach Bliley, the Security Exchange Act of 1934 and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) require ensuring that documents are retained for a specified period of time and are immediately accessible.

At the same time, consumer privacy continues o be a growing concern. The Gramm-Leach Bliley Act insures that financial services customers’ personal information is protected in the same vein as the Health Information Accountability Act (HIPAA) for medical records. Document handling and faxing pose very significant risks to privacy because of the uncertainty about the conditions around the receiving fax machine.

Responding to these corporate imperatives directly impacts the company’s document handling of complex content and retention policies and supporting infrastructure for ‘mixed-mode’ documents (both paper and electronic).

Compliance and privacy-driven technology

Document retention is a mandatory aspect of many regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires that hard copies of certain corporate records and work papers be maintained for a period of five years. On the other hand, the SEC has adopted a seven-year retention period for paper documents. Given the E-Sign Act of 2001, documents must be retained in a form that accurately reflects the information in the contract or other record and in a form that allows it to be accurately reproduced for later access, transmission or printing. Certainly, document integrity is an important imperative.

And when it comes to document accessibility, AML, for example, requires that records must be retained for a period of five years and must be filed or stored in such a way as to be accessible within a reasonable period of time. Companies must consider all of these aspects and develop a strategy that will enable them to meet all of them successfully.

The compliance and privacy imperative

Paper documents will continue to remain a business factor for the foreseeable future, and it is essential that IT organizations of every size adopt a document retention policy that addresses mixed-mode documents. A sound IT infrastructure will address both disparate origination and destination sources for all mixed-mode documents. The integration of paper and electronic documents is imperative for enterprise-wide accessibility, compliance-based retention and tracking as well as general productivity.

Special attention has been paid to corporate electronic information systems and their underlying support for compliance initiatives. However, until companies look across their entire content base to both paper and electronically archived information, they cannot achieve full compliance. Solving half the problem does not mean a company has achieved compliance. On a daily basis, companies must now handle documents through a process requiring constant integration of paper and electronic document systems in order to achieve a fully compliant enterprise.

Solutions for compliance and privacy conformance

There are several specific issues that companies must be concerned with when preparing for both compliance and internal corporate initiatives for document handling. One document technology platform, in particular, that helps organizations solve these challenges is Omtool AccuRoute. A platform for document capture, process and distribution, AccuRoute enables businesses to handle complex document distribution and routing requirements efficiently and cost-effectively. By integrating paper and electronic documents into a single, efficient and managed system, AccuRoute allows users to define document distribution requirements and accomplish multiple, complex document routing tasks easily, while providing companies with increased control over security, privacy and compliance-related issues, all from the users’ desktop. AccuRoute enables:

• Comprehensive document retention: capture mixed-mode documents and distribute to required destinations simultaneously. Distribution rules (electronic filing, destinations, formats, etc.) represented by AccuRoute’s ‘embedded directives’ may be re-used and shared to eliminate redundancy.
• Document integrity: create electronic versions of documents that preserve the documents’ original appearance.
• Information security: maintain document security and information privacy through AccuRoute's secure integration and delivery as well as its tracking features.
• Document accessibility: process and store mixed-mode documents in one central location or in multiple locations (simultaneously) as well as create text-searchable documents.

Ultimately, Omtool, through its comprehensive AccuRoute platform, delivers the ideal compliance solution to mixed-mode document handling requirements. AccuRoute’s device-independent platform for simultaneous mixed-mode document capture, process and delivery makes it easy to centralize critical company information and to store, share and exchange content conveniently while supporting compliance requirements. It’s the ultimate tool and one that companies can rely on to finally achieve that corporate grail of 100 percent compliance.