Have you ever wondered whether the package that you had sent via FedEx, USPS, UPS, or otherwise had arrived and wished that you had kept the receipt? This particular blog post is not for those of you who are terribly organized and automatically keep all of your receipts for everything or for those of you who have learned the hard way to keep all of your receipts that contain tracking numbers. The purpose of this blog post is to help the rest of you not have to learn the hard way.

The purpose of keeping tracking numbers and actually tracking the whereabouts of whatever you are sending is to be able to prove that the person that you had sent something to actually received whatever you had sent. You may wonder why you might need to prove that you had sent something and that the right person had received whatever you had sent. In the context of HIPAA, for example, you may need to prove that you had sent and that the intended recipient had received certain patient records. As Jon Tomes always says in his HIPAA training presentations and in his books and otherwise, “For HIPAA compliance purposes, if it’s not written, it’s not.” If you should need to prove to a court or to an administrative agency, such as the Department of Health and Human Services (“DHHS”) Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) or Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”), that you had sent something and that the intended recipient had received whatever you had sent, you would stand a much better chance of proving your point if you had something official in writing. You could, for example, blow an appeal if you missed the deadline because whatever you were supposed to have sent to OCR or OIG got lost in transit and you had no proof that you had timely sent it. For example, Jon Tomes and his law partner, Richard Dvorak, once saved a case in their law practice because they were able to prove that they had timely sent whatever they were supposed to have sent and that the carrier had failed to deliver it. Judges and investigators do not like to actually have to decide cases and are pleased to have an excuse to flush out a case. Thus, if they can flush a case because you failed to file on time, they are happy to do so.

Just because you have never had a problem with FedEx, USPS, UPS, or any other carrier does not mean that you never will have such a problem. Mistakes happen. Trust me. A little CYA never hurt anyone. Keeping track of your tracking numbers can save you a lot of grief, time, and expense. Jon will soon be drafting a sample mail handling policy for incoming and outgoing mail to be available on the Premium Member section of our Veterans Press website. If you have ideas for what you would like for Jon to include in such a policy, please let us know. The best ideas seem to come from our clients and customers.

Happy New Year from all of us here at Veterans Press, EMR Legal, and Tomes & Dvorak, and keep those tracking numbers.