Consumers are encouraged to protect themselves from potential financial harm by ensuring that all companies they do business with are in compliance with the new rules.
PRI is a supplier of vehicle repossession services to the Financial Institution sector and therefore recognizes the need to comply with the FTC’s ruling on Identity Theft. PRI has a Red Flag Policy in place and is in full compliance with the FACT Act Identity Theft Flag.
According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)…”the Red Flags Rule was developed pursuant to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act of 2003. Under the Rule, financial institutions and creditors with covered accounts must have identity theft prevention programs to identify, detect and respond to patterns, practices or specific activities that could indicate identity theft. The Rule applies to creditors and financial institutions. Federal Law defines a creditor to be: any entity that regularly extends, renews or continuous credit; any entity that regularly arranges for extension, renewal, or continuation of credit; or any assignee of an original creditor who is involved in the decision to extend, renew or continue credit. Accepting credit cards as a form of payment does not, in and of itself, make an entity a creditor. Some examples of creditors are finance companies, automobile dealers, mortgage brokers, utility companies, telecommunication companies and non-profit and government entities that defer payment for goods or services…”
Identity Theft is the fastest growing crime in this country and 9 million Americans have their identity stolen each year, with disastrous effects. This is a very serious situation and thankfully our Government have seen it as such to enforce the FACTA laws.
You may ask - HOW THE FACTA RED FLAG LAW AFFECTS OUR BUSINESS? Well, this new law provision has established a higher level of responsibility associated with identity theft for businesses and because PRI strives and achieves the highest level of professionalism, it continues to meet all legal requirements, be they State or Federal regulated.
PRI is a responsible employer and has ensured that all its employees have been trained to understand and implement the company’s Red Flag Policy.
We at PRI have a secure environment which involves a multi-layered security approach to protect client information. Security at Payback Repo begins with training and an understanding of our organization and its goals, plans, policies, processes, IT and people infrastructure. We deter, detect, and defend against security breaches by monitoring websites of our software and have up-to-date programs to prevent unauthorized access.
We also have a code of ethics plan in place that encourages all employees to come forward with any information regarding any breach in company ethics. So not through only technology, but also through training and education of our culture we promote at Payback Repo honesty and integrity in protecting client and customer information.
PRI's internal controls and checks and balances to ensure protection of clients data starts with risk assessment, which for us is basically an overall assessment of the risks to our business operation (both internal and external) and the controls in place to manage such risks. We call it the control factor, which focuses on what controls are in place and should be put in place. Those controls include both manual and computer run information input as well as knowledge and education of personnel and determination as to what personnel are necessary, what their jobs are, what their limitations are and establishing a Code of Conduct and Employee Manual.
Primary importance within the system are the checks and balances. PRI has different levels of personnel each with differing authority and there is supervision in place to check on the progress being made and the adherence being made to policies that have been established. Our checks and balances is very particularized to the repossession industry operations and is established and documented by the most knowledgeable personnel within our company, our CEO, VP, and COO.
Newest to PRI is our "paperless policy". Payback Repo now uses the cloud to store all of our documents and to back up all of our data for disaster recovery. We use the most trusted source in the country...paper and paper port anywhere. Perhaps more than any other industry, our repossession industry – is defined by the vast volumes of paperwork it produces and processes.
Nuance's PRI Cloud allows us to Eliminates off site record storage
- Digitize and organize our paper records and repossession docs...then shreds them at our request
- Secure customer and client documents.
- PRI Security - increased the security of documents with encryption, secure storage, user authentication, redaction, and the ability to track access and changes to documents.
- Disaster Recovery - By using this new system we have strengthen our business-continuity strategies by ensuring all documents are digitized and archived off-site in event of a disaster.
- Password-protected 128-bit-encrypted document distribution reduces the possibility of unauthorized access to classified information and records.
- Sending electronic documents by e-mail rather than fax ensures confidential, password-protected delivery to a private in box rather than a public fax machine.
- We can redact sensitive passages from scanned documents prior to scanning, storing, or sending. Nuance maintains a transaction log of all e-mail activity and sends a copy of the sent message and attachments to the sender’s sent-items folder.
- Secure log-in and authentication features restrict unauthorized users from accessing or distributing information
- Archive and stores our newly electronic documents at a secure remote location for backup and our disaster recovery.
We control who has access to what and the best part is there is never a need for display of orders. We have a virtual calendar which we determine who needs access and who does not. Now there is a virtual cloud attached to our calendars and the orders are accessible to whoever we want and for whatever time frame we want them to be.
