Personally, I find the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act a total waste of time.
If anyone were to use your personal information to your detriment there have always been ways in which to take legal action to prevent that continuing.
But now we have the situation that some trustees and managing agents are afraid to tell the truth in case some owner or tenant takes offence.
Take for instance a report to owners showing those units which are in arrears with levies or service fees.
Are you allowed to put in the name of the debtor or can you only use their unit numbers?
What about putting in their door numbers, which is used where unit numbers and door numbers are different.
I believe that it is ridiculous to be afraid to put in the people’s names.
That is how we know who they are.
In our management department, we tried using debtors lists but it was impossible to get a picture of the debt in a building without knowing who these people were and we have reverted to including the door numbers and names.
What was interesting was that putting back the names meant that we could see a pattern to the debts, especially where a number of properties belonged to one owner.
It also helped to correct errors where, for example, an owner had paid service fees into a levy account.
It could lead to the ridiculous situation where a landlord is not allowed to know the name of his tenant – red tape madness.
We have only had one incident so far in one of our buildings where we had an owner who continually put out his rubbish after the specified time and the bag was always left behind by the dustbin collectors with the expected problem of the bag being opened by dogs and the rubbish being scattered around.
This happened week after week despite reminders and newsletters.
To find out who the culprit was, the bag was investigated and invoices were found to indicate who the culprit was.
His rubbish was duly returned to his front door with the invoice on top to show them that it was their rubbish.
The owner went pop because we had invaded his privacy.
No, in my opinion the POPI Act is totally unnecessary and just adding to the cost of doing business.
What a waste of time and energy.
- Mike Spencer is the founder and owner of Platinum Global. He is also a professional associated property valuer and consultant with work across the country as well as Eastern Europe and Australia.