Quality Delegation Services / Overseeing

Records created in your name belong to you

And should be retrievable without the partner's cooperation.

Records generated by a partner delivering under a principal's approval are the principal's records for most regulatory purposes, and the principal is responsible for their accuracy, security and retention regardless of where they physically sit.

The arrangement that avoids most problems is for records to be created directly in the principal's own system rather than in the partner's and transferred periodically. Transfers are where records are lost, altered, delayed and formatted into unusability.

Where the partner's system must be used, the principal needs direct access rather than reports, a defined transfer frequency, and a verification that what arrived matches what should have. Reconciliation on counts alone will not detect content problems.

Data protection obligations apply throughout, and where the partner is in another jurisdiction the arrangements for cross-border handling of personal information need to be settled explicitly against the applicable privacy law rather than assumed.

The test worth applying is what happens if the partner stops cooperating tomorrow. If the answer is that the records become unreachable, the arrangement has a defect that no clause resolves after the fact.