Bob Mikell for Ask ELT

Speaker: Bob Mikell, General Counsel

Bob Mikell: Hey, welcome to the normally beautiful, but currently very wet, Statesboro, Georgia for Ask an ELT Member. My name is Bob Mikell. I serve as the General Counsel for AgSouth, the attorney. The question I got deals with Special Assets and paper files, and it's how long are we to retain paper files in the Special Assets Department? This is answer can be found in our PolicyStat. If you search the retention schedule, there is a policy and procedure on retention schedule, which is just how long do we keep documents? How do we keep the documents? Is it paper or electronic? There's an Excel spreadsheet that has all the different types of documents and how long they should be kept. With Special Assets, it's 10 years from liquidation. So, when we pay out, or foreclose, or kind of in that relationship, we still retain it for 10 years in paper form. This is a longer retention schedule for this one because Special Assets oftentimes there's litigation, there's some issues that may crop up in the future. So, you want to make sure that you have those for a longer time than you would other documents and in a format that is different from other documents. And when we get asked to update or review the retention schedule, how we keep documents, whether we scan them or whether we keep them in paper and when should we delete them, there's a lot of different layers we have to look at. We have to look at does our regulations with the Farm Credit Administration, our regulator, does it have somewhere in there a specific rule about how long that document should be kept? Does the CFPB, some other financial regulator, that may have some requirements that touch on that document that may apply to us, are those at play? Are there state law requirements with respect to how to keep something? Are there licensing requirements? Are there best practices that we have to adhere to for litigation if we're going to possibly have to go to court on something and we need the paper document. Well, how long should we keep it just from a business standpoint? And also there may be other AgFirst credit manual or supervising bank requirements. So there's multiple layers, I wish you could just go look in one book and it would tell you. But because of our unique nature, there's lots of different things at play. So we try to look at all those and get the right answer and get that thing updated. So, that's the answer to that question. I hope to see you next time on another segment of Ask an ELT Member.