Terminated Employee's personal information

Zanne

We are a bank with a financial center. We recently received a request from the financial center for terminated employee's addresses and phone numbers so as to "help" them with their retirement distributions.

As an old HR hag, I have a problem with this. I have agreed to pull this from the retirement files - but not from the employment record. I have been branded a "bad employee" for wanting to protect current and former employee's private information.

Your thoughts on how to handle this and any applicable law?

Parabeagle

May not be logistically possible, but if it's just a few you could send the former ee's a letter explaining that the financial center wants to contact them but you need their written authorization to release their address/phone number to the center. That would be my approach, anyway. Anymore I don't even let employees go to the restroom without a signed release. x;-)

Zanne

That's the way I was "brought up" in HR - but I'm now with a very small (200 employee) company that is very paternalistic.

Parabeagle

As much as the boss would like to think it, the paternalism in your culture does not negate your responsibility to protect privileged information. x:-)

Don D

If it's anything like our 401(k), the retirement plan administration company we use as 'recordkeeper' will get addresses from us and they then send 'force out' letters to the participants/ex-employees who have under a certain dollar amount in the plan and the participant has to make an election of either rolling it over or lump sum distribution. I don't know if that's what's being done in your case or not. In such cases though, they already know everything there is to know about these people in the first place unless someone's address in inaccurate. If they didn't already have the census information on the participants, you can bet I would not give it to them. Might be another marketing scheme.

Zanne

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 03-06-03 AT 04:13PM (CST)[/font][p]I think that every single HR person who has logged on to this site agrees that the employee's personal information isn't to be given out.

I'm thinking that the personal tort of "invasion of privacy" is the best I"ll find.

Other thoughts? (Yes - common sense - but that doesn't seem to wash)

pecohr

I agree with the comments made above and believe that the financial center should already have this information as a matter of record.

SA