How Long Should Companies Make E-Bills Available?

theodp writes "If you say goodbye to paper and hello to green, you may learn first-hand that no good deed goes unpunished. Try to pay your final Verizon Wireless bill online after switching carriers, for example, and don't be surprised if you get a sorry-Dave-I'm-afraid-I-can't-do-that reply. Other vendors may curtail e-Bill services 30 days after you end service. And a promise of access to up to seven years of paperless statements is somewhat empty if you'll be cutoff as soon as you no longer have an account. With more-and-more companies enticing consumers to go paperless, how long a period of time should the records be made available online? Should it extend beyond the life of an account?"

Comments

if the tax agency comes knocking...

[timmarhy]

... i bet they are still available.

Re:if the tax agency comes knocking...

[commodore64_love]

Well of course they're still available. I called my Discover Card one time to look-up old statements from three years ago, and they were not available online, so they politely mailed me printouts. There was no charge.

As for going paperless, I've not done it because I'd probably forget to pay the bill! ;-)
Receiving that paper in the mail is a convenient reminder.

Re:if the tax agency comes knocking...

[nahdude812]

I thought this eBill thing was a neat idea when it first came out years ago for one of my monthly services. So I signed up for it. There was an error in my billing a few months later, and I called and had it corrected. Instead of showing up as a correction on my following billing statement, they had changed the original incorrect bill. Looking at my online account, everything seemed as if it had never had an error.

I canceled eBill immediately and refuse it from all other vendors now. I want this information for my own records, and I don't want them being the one who controls it and gets to rewrite history in case there was a problem.

I'd consider it if they could email me a PDF of the same document that comes as a paper bill. They can put all those other bells and whistles on too if they want, but I want a copy in my possession that they don't have access to change, without having to remember to save it out by hand every month, and in a format that gives me the legal leverage I need to be able to prove the document came from them (eg, email headers on the email with the attachment on a 3rd party mail server such as GMail).

EBilling is a way for your service provider to control history, and to deny you access to information which might condemn them should they screw up in some serious way. I need better control over this than ebilling provides.

statute of limitations

[Bunyip Redgum]

They should provide access as long as one might reasonably need it which is at least as long as the statute of limitations give one to take legal action.

Entitlement ... what is with it?

[shri]

Is it me or are people just whinging about the smallest thing? I fail to see why any institution that I've chosen not to do business with, should continue to serve me for free. If a paper trail is that important, print a copy of the bill and file it, or create PDF of the online bill and store it.

Re:Alternative to online account access/storage

[DSmith1974]

Because statements sent from Bob to Alice would likely be intercepted by Carol who could use that information to the detriment of Alice. What we need is encrypted email, but since the majority of users don't care/couldn't decrypt it anyway, it won't happen until the process is made totally seamless which is up to us engineers. But since the banks are more often passing on the cost of fraud back to the customer and charging twice to insure an already safe bank account against identity theft - why should they care enough to spend the big bucks to do a proper job?

Re:more paper == more trees

[hab136]

"Paperless is green" is a foul's quest.

A chicken's quest? Probably meant "fool", but it's funnier this way. :)

Anyways the "paperless is green" idea isn't because we're going to run out of wood. Almost all paper is made from trees that are grown (and replanted and regrown) for that purpose. However turning that wood into paper and shipping it to the utility uses energy and money. Putting ink on the paper likewise isn't free, and mailing it (in postal trucks that burn gas) isn't free either.

Whether you measure in total energy spent or dollars, it's cheaper to have online bills than mailing out paper statements. Most places let you download a PDF of what the paper statement would have been, giving you the efficiencies of online bills while still being able to have a copy of old bills (and print them on demand).

Utilities push online billing because it saves them money; the fact that it also saves energy in the process and is more convenient for consumers is a win/win/win.

It doesn't stop paper arriving though!

[MessyBlob]

In my experience, paperless billing only cuts paper by about 20%. Companies and institutions that are savvy enough allow the switchover to paperless billing, are also savvy enough to have a continuous mailshot campaign. The result is that you are still mailbombed and sent changes to T&Cs, for example. The cynical view is that 'paperless billing' is Greenwash (go look that word up if you haven't seen it before) - it's really about saving the company money by not paying the third-party billing service.

Re:Alternative to online account access/storage

[xaxa]

My previous mobile contract had paperless billing, and you could either view the bill as HTML, or click the "Download" button which gave you a PDF to save. This was over SSL, of course. You could email it to yourself if you really wanted to.
I don't know if/when they'll close the account, but it's now been open for about a month after the contract ended.

If I asked for a duplicate paper copy of a bill in two years time, it would be reasonable for the company to charge me. So, I don't see why they should have to keep the bill-viewing service running indefinitely either.

Re:Alternative to online account access/storage

[commodore64_love]

>>>Because statements sent from Bob to Alice would likely be intercepted by Carol

So? My neighbors routinely intercept my snail-mail, and yet they've never sought to do harm to me. They just politely wrote "forward" and it eventually found its way to me. People have this false belief that physical mail is somehow more secure, but in reality it's just as vulnerable as email.