Stonewall with Abbey

sticher

Hi, I am trying to reclaim bank charges for my partner. 3 times the Abbey has sent me the same set of statements, going back about 1 year. They also asked for £10 payment - we authorised this to be taken from partners account but they just ignored it. We sent again, this time using the data protection letter and enclosing £10 cash as receommend here and we received yet another set of duplicate statements and a letter stating:

'Abbey is not normally required to hold past transaction details on accounts for more than six years (I think I asked for them to start from when I originally started the claim, but obviously time has passed).

Unfortunately we are unable to supply a list of charges applied to your account for the last six years because we do not store this information separately from other transactional data. We can only supply a list of the transactions on your account which will include details of any charges applied.
I would like to advise you that under a Data Protection Act Request, you will only recieve the transactions that are currently held on our systems. These will be forwarded to you within 40 days, free of charge, under separeate cover. Any earlier transactions have been archieved onto microfiche, which is not covered by the Data Protection Act. These archieved transavtions will not therefore be supplied to you under a Data Protection Act request and will not be subject to the 40 day ruling.

We can however supply details of the transactions held on the mircrofiche on payment of an administration fee of £10.00 for mulitple monthly statements per account that have been archieved.'

I have now received a two page printout of details relating to 05 (have already received this on one previous occasion).

How long do I have to wait for the rest (if in fact they are going to send them, which as they say there is no time limit could be never.)

What should I do next. I seem to be hitting a brickwall and obviously not doing something right.

any suggestions appreciated. Thanks.

MPH80

I'm afraid they may be right about the microfiche not being covered by the DPA:

http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/Global/faqs/data_protection_for_organisations.aspx

Manual records need to be in a relevant filing system. The files which form part of the relevant filing system are structured or referenced in such a way that information about the applicant can be easily located. Where manual files fall within the definition of a relevant filing system, the content will either be sub-divided, which allows the searcher to go straight to the correct category and retrieve the information requested without a manual search, or will be indexed to allow the searcher to go directly to a relevant page(s).

So assuming they have no indexing on the microfiche - then it wouldn't be covered.

Interesting choice to use that technology though ...

My impression of their communication would be that the next step you have to take is to send £10 to get that statement for further back.

M.

dchurch24

We'll know for sure in 2 days - that's when the IC is going into Abbey to investigate their Microfiche system.

It seems odd that Abbey claim that Microfiche isn't covered - it IS covered if it's a relevent filing system.

sticher

Thanks for your replies. I have already sent the £10 but have only received what I received before I sent the £10 (if you see what I mean).

What is that about the IC going into Abbey. I will have a root about to find out more. Thanks.

lynzpower

The Information Commissioner is having some sort of episode with Abbey, I believe either today or tomorrow to get to the bottom of this microfiche issue once and for all. ( heres hoping)

plenty of info on https://www.consumeractiongroup.com/forum about this