Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Definitions
Government includes all levels from federal to local. Agencies includes all agencies including legislative bodies and all levels of courts. Records includes all information generated, collected, and maintained by government agencies. Public is, strangely enough, another word for the private sector, as well as denoting availability of government records to the private sector. Document is a record that is filed with a government agency using paper or a paper or electronically filed form.
Types of Records
Records is a generic term that is not useful in describing the actual stuff that government agencies hold. For example, a legislative bill has little in common with a tax return or a deed, but all are considered records. Records may or may not constitute information to the government agency. A land recording office has no interest in any but a small portion of the content of a deed, mortgage or other document submitted to the office. The recorders job is to see that an image of the document is maintained and available as needed. In order to fashion legislation to address personal information privacy concerns, the drafters need to be aware of the different forms of records that may contain such information. Records can be distinguished in a number of ways, as follows:
Many other records arise from the private sector, such as land records, UCC filings, and articles of incorporation.
a. Index to document
UCC and grantor/grantee indexes are obvious example of a reasonably pure document index, that is, one that has a minimum of actual document data in it and that points to the real record of interest, the document. It is always necessary when using this type of index to get a copy of the record to know what it contains. In addition to the bare information necessary to point to the relevant documents, indexes can contain other data. For example a court index may in fact be the docket, a summary record of all the actions taken with respect to a particular case. This expanded index record can then point to the various complaints, answers and other filings in the case so that you can request just the documents that fit your particular need.
b. Index to data
If the information is already in data form, as defined above, the second step is to drill down in the computer files to the full data. For example, an assessors property record containing information about your residence is a data record you can locate through indexes of property addresses or owner names.
Types of Data
In addition, the types of data contained in documents can be distinguished, as follows:
1. Required
The real estate statutes of many states require a deed or mortgage to specify the marital status of the parties who are individuals due to other state law considerations, such as in Arizona, a community property state. In Arizona, marital information therefore appears in the public record.
2. Discretionary
The new UCC1 form as designed in 1998 contained a box titled something like Taxpayer ID although the new Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code did not require the social security number of an individual debtor to be entered on the form (except in the North and South Dakota versions). Financial institutions persisted in entering the SSN, so the form has been redesigned to eliminate the heading on the box.
3. Inadvertent
Many financial institutions persist in entering the SSN of individual debtors on mortgages to be recorded. There is no good reason for this practice, and it may even be an unacceptable practice under GrammLeach-Bliley. Since the mortgage is public record, the SSN inadvertently becomes public record too.
Conclusions
Statutes that purport to make confidential certain information in the hands of government need to identify and deal with all these permutations of types of records and data. If the information is data, it is simple to redact. If the data is embedded in an unformatted document, it may be impossible to redact, but it may be possible to keep the document from being recorded in the first place.