Our Compliance

We want to work with you in ensuring that our procedures around best practice match our (And your) stated aims concerning ethics, probity and standards.

They go hand in hand.

We are constantly learning from other agencies about their data processing and handling protocols and we remain at the forefront of best practice as we are a successful, expanding company and are also accredited to SFJ (Skills for Justice) as a training organisation (PITUK offers OFQUAL-approved qualifications for Professional Investigators).

We are full members of the Institute of Professional Investigators and the World Association of Professional Investigators and participate in both organisations – attending annual general meetings and training and social events. Our Disclosure and Barring Service (Used to be called: Criminal Records Bureau CRB) checks are thereby confirmed as being clear and up to date.

We are fully in step with the initiatives set out by the Institute of Professional Investigators and the World Association of Professional Investigators in their Confederation of Professional Investigators UK (COPI UK) initiative.

The COPI Code of Conduct and their UK GDPR guidance is our “Go to” reference material.

Process Serving

We must be both reactive and proactive as a busy investigation’s agency – we currently major in process serving and interact with the public on a daily basis – it is not uncommon for us to be in Blackpool and at the same time as we are in Scarborough – two costal town towns 155 miles apart. We have four full time process servers and can easily cover the North of England from our bases. Manchester, Oldham, Bolton, Huddersfield, Doncaster, Rotherham, Harrogate and York are our usual destinations.

We often use our office-based teams to assist us locate addresses and the team are constantly scouring social media and other resources to assist the process servers. Indeed we are updating our team, in real time, right up to the point when they serve the documents.

We can, ping, service documents out to our process servers in the field using secure (GDPA/ DPA) comms and they print off time critical/ urgent serves.

Process Serving is not being a “Glorified Postman”. It is hard, challenging work which requires exceptional, “People Skills” and of course our team will work to the highest standards when handling sensitive and non-sensitive data.

Civil Recovery or Legal Proceedings

As we are aligned and accredited investigators – we are permitted to access both personal data and “Sensitive” personal data in certain, specifically designated instances, such as when a Legitimate Interest is established under Article 6(1)(f) of GDPR and/or Schedule 2, para 5(3) of DPA 2018.
Every step we take is scrutinised and double checked. We can’t afford to mess up.

You will be reassured to know that we carefully scrutinise every instruction we receive. We enable both client screening (Know your customer) and scrupulously proceed to complete the task with best practice at the forefront of all our work – when locating and investigating witnesses, debtors, beneficiaries and fraudsters.

Civil and Criminal Procedure Rules awareness is entwined with DPA and GDPR best practice.

Tracing

We are acknowledged as debtor tracing experts and have won awards specifically for our excellence in Debt Collection.

We assist the debt collection sector with our trace excellence.

Triage is perhaps the best description that dictates our work flows – we deal with single and bulk traces and adapt the team as required.

Each trace is allocated a sector expert. They decide the specific operational processes and procedures.

The work is easy and straightforward if the instructions emanate from the legal sector as the legal basis will be clear and unambiguous.

KYC and post trace consent is the mantra if we are working on “people trace” work.

Surveillance

It is all about ethics, probity and standards. The surveillance-specific professional private investigators already know that evidence gathered in any form is subject to strict regulation.

We consider Civil and Criminal Procedures in conjunction with DPA / GDPR.

RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000) is our “Go to” regulation that directs us to avoid “Intrusive” surveillance. So we won’t do any surveillance in a personal space such as a home, hotel or even a vehicle.

We will consider the use of trackers if we are unable to follow the subject of enquiry using our operatives.

we retain surveillance footage for a 6-year period (Should it be required for inspection in, future, criminal proceedings) and will delete the footage thereafter in accordance with good practice directives derived from the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 (section 23(1)) Code of Practice.