When I worked at WaMu, I had to give the meeting on the Patriot Act when it came out, and on how it applied to banks.
It *does*, in fact, say that financial institutions are supposed to get a street address on everyone. They weren't BS-ing you on that. It says that they are allowed to use a PO Box for mailing but that they have to have a physical address on file. Most institutions' systems are set up too stupidly to have two separate addresses and only send mail to one, though, so they end up mailing to the physical address as in the comment above, or otherwise abusing it.
The law itself is bad enough; the boneheaded implementation it tends to get is often worse.
I don't know what E*Trade is, so I don't know why they don't require your physical address. Perhaps they're some different classification of institution that isn't subject to the same rules. Or perhaps they're just ignoring it.
Anyway, it's still crap, it's just slightly different crap than you thought. :)
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Date: 2004-11-09 04:51 pm (UTC)It *does*, in fact, say that financial institutions are supposed to get a street address on everyone. They weren't BS-ing you on that. It says that they are allowed to use a PO Box for mailing but that they have to have a physical address on file. Most institutions' systems are set up too stupidly to have two separate addresses and only send mail to one, though, so they end up mailing to the physical address as in the comment above, or otherwise abusing it.
The law itself is bad enough; the boneheaded implementation it tends to get is often worse.
I don't know what E*Trade is, so I don't know why they don't require your physical address. Perhaps they're some different classification of institution that isn't subject to the same rules. Or perhaps they're just ignoring it.
Anyway, it's still crap, it's just slightly different crap than you thought. :)