Legal, regulatory and tax rules have long required businesses to maintain years of records, causing them to store paper-based agreements and other documents in file cabinets or in stacks of boxes often relegated to back rooms, basements or even separate storage facilities. Organizations of all types and sizes have encountered substantial growth in the volume of business documents they generate, and many have struggled to keep up in terms of storing and maintaining this information. Adding to that, paper-intensive record-keeping is expensive and tedious, not to mention cumbersome in terms of providing easy access to those within the company who need it most.
While intelligent document management provides a number of advantages for any organization with an exorbitant number of documents still in paper form, there are three industries that stand to benefit big this year due to urgent marketplace pressures.
Public works
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared a “war on lead.” As a result, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) has set aside $55 billion for the EPA to improve drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. Most of those dollars will flow through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) programs administered by the EPA and used by states to provide low-cost financing for local water projects up until 2026.
There are 11,000 communities in the country with lead pipes, but many areas still do not know where these pipes are—making the extent and location of this problem a significant unknown. Fortunately, the federal Lead and Copper Rule Revisions Rule (LCRR), enacted at the end of 2021, has started the clock on the requirement for all water systems across the country to submit an inventory of their lead service lines (LSLs). While the compliance deadline is Oct. 16, 2024, some states, such as New Jersey, have moved forward with laws that call for an even faster timetable for submitting inventories.
The challenge is the fact that some cities don’t have good records for their LSLs. The Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies says it will be a massive undertaking to find them all, possibly requiring municipalities and utilities to visually inspect each home’s service line.
Time is not only ticking to meet the federal regulation’s inventory requirement, but also to tap into the available funding for LSL replacement before it dries up. A water system with an LSL inventory in place will be in a much better position to access the funding programs—quicker.
Additionally, having an inventory will make it easier for communities to put price tags on replacements—ultimately helping them to identify the most adequate funding strategy from all available grants and loans. LSL inventories will also make it easier for utilities to plan more equitable and efficient approaches to replacements on a block-by-block basis.
Automotive
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) is a U.S. Federal law enacted in 1999 that governs the way financial institutions handle consumers' personal financial information. The law requires financial institutions to explain their information-sharing practices to consumers and to safeguard sensitive data. Automotive dealers may be subject to the GLBA if they offer financial services, such as financing, leasing, and insurance, to customers, or if they collect personal information from customers as part of the car-buying process.
In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revised the Safeguards Rule to require financial institutions to take additional measures to protect and secure customer information. This rule oversees how financial institutions protect consumer data. While these changes took effect back in January 2022, the compliance deadline was extended to June 9, 2023. That means, on this date, qualifying auto dealerships will be required to develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive security system to keep customer information safe and secure.
If an auto dealership offers credit and financing options, it is legally considered a lender and must comply with GLBA, including the Privacy Rule and the Safeguards Rule. Even if a dealership is passing the information on to another lending institution, it is still liable for protecting the customer data being collected along the way.
GLBA is an extremely important consideration for automotive dealerships. The negative consequences of noncompliance include unnecessary fines and penalties. A financial institution faces a fine up to $100,000 for each violation. Its officers and directors can be fined up to $10,000, imprisoned for five years or both. Not to mention, a data breach or other failure to protect customer financial information can damage an auto dealership’s reputation and potentially lead to lost business.
Legal
Legal offices are inundated with documents from multiple sources: emails, electronic filing systems, United States Postal Service mail, facsimiles, and even client-specific software. Manually receiving, analyzing, and storing documents from various channels is not only burdensome, but opens the door for misplacing and mishandling sensitive materials. The task is not only to keep up with the flow of documents across several channels, but to ensure compliance with contractual confidentiality agreements and ever-changing privacy laws.
Since the pandemic, law firms have been under the gun to reduce overhead costs; deal with an existing workforce that is becoming increasingly burned out; better meet their clients’ online expectations; figure out how to keep up with advancements in technology; and attract top talent (who likely grew up with smart phones in their hands). All this while needing to enhance their information security as data breaches at law firms continue to increase.
In these industries where time is money, inefficient document-management practices only exacerbate their challenges. An intelligent document management solution can create a funnel where all sources of documents flow through the same, secure system to maximize efficiency and, most importantly, ensure compliance.