You MUST Know Who Your Customer Really Is!

The OFT has confirmed that new guidance on debt collection is in the early stages of being drafted. Draft guidance is expected imminently, but the OFT does not expect to publish final guidelines before the Autumn.

The main issue here is data accuracy, and the guidelines that will eventually arrive will focus on making sure that innocent individuals are not chased for consumer debt on the basis of false or erroneous information given by creditors to debt collection agencies - but the fact is that far too many companies have been far too careless about getting their information right about purely commercial customers for far too long.

There is, of course, rarely an excuse for the existence of inaccurate - or incomplete - data on any customer of any kind at any time, but where commercial customers are concerned, the opportunities for making sure that data is absolutely complete and correct, and the margin for error is so much reduced, that there is no excuse at all for errors of any kind.

But they still happen.

I continue to receive instructions to proceed (for really quite large sums of money!) against companies that do not, and have never, existed. And I still see new account opening forms, fully completed, signed and dated by 'directors' (who afterwards prove to be untraceable!) that show false company names - and false company numbers that lack the odd digit or two.

I've been singing the 'You must know your customer' song for so many years now that I'm sick of hearing it myself - and keeping my temper and my tongue between my teeth and refraining from saying, 'I warned you', or 'It serves you right', is getting harder all the time.

But I can say it here:

If you don't know who your customer is, it's going to serve you right if things go wrong. And I've warned you about it not once, but many times.