I received a letter this morning from an accounting company marked “Private and Confidential”
Feeling all excitable I decided to open it. You never know with accountants. It could be a long lost relative deciding to leave money to me in their will.
It wasn’t it was an offer to do payroll for our company. That’s an interesting service, agreed, not one I need to buy.
But why is it Private and Confidential. In order for it to be private it must be something that is for my eyes only, something that is personal to me. For it to be confidential it must be something that if anyone else was to read it then I may be in deep trouble. For it to be both basically means, if anyone touches this, other than me, they will be shot.
This letter was so non-private and non-confidential that the sender didn’t even bother to sign it themselves, it was a digital signature.
Shame on them.
This is a reckless abuse of the post and of an address on an envelope and I have had enough of it. I intend to use this blog to post the names and web site addresses of any company that sends me a Private and Confidential letter when it isn’t. That way you can harass them directly.
So let me just retrieve this letter from the bin. Oh yes, here it is Bishop Fleming Chartered Accountants, based out of Torquay. torquay@bishopfleming.com is there email address. I publish this here, because it will certainly be harvested and then spammed heavily. Just like they did to me.
It’s probably worth noting that i heard from the company they made the following defence of themselves:
“one particular reason we address such correspondence private and confidential is because we try to ensure any literature in connection with our payroll service that we send to companies who aren’t currently using our services, is opened by the person within the company who would make such decisions. From a staffing perspective, outsourcing the payroll can potentially be a sensitive area, which we respect and understand company decision makers wouldn’t necessarily want in the public domain prior to any decisions around this area having been made.”
So they address it as P&C because they worry that it might cause offense. That’s nice.
The fact that more people open it is just a side benefit.