Central archiving for bankruptcy files

All Zurich notaries are simultaneously bankruptcy offices and land registry offices. Zurich bankruptcy offices are obliged to keep not only their own files from bankruptcy proceedings, but also the business files of the respective bankrupt company. The legal retention requirement is generally 10 years (30 years for individual files). Notaries now operate nine so-called central archives, particularly for storing business files for ten years. The nine central archives are located at seven locations and are each affiliated with a local bankruptcy office/notary's office. The management of an archive (warehouse inventory, receipts and withdrawals) is carried out by a notary employee from the on-site notary's office. An IT application offers an overall overview of the utilization of the individual archives. The increasing number of bankruptcies in the canton of Zurich means that the amount of bankruptcy and business files is also increasing and the existing central archives of the notaries' offices are reaching, or in some cases have already reached, the limit of their capacity. For this reason and the need not to burden the canton's bankruptcy offices with additional storage services, the management of the Notary Inspectorate has decided to outsource bankruptcy file storage as a sustainable, scalable solution.