Platform · 08
Legal holds and stopping deliveries
How a company records a court order, a recall or an authority's request about its goods, and how it stops every delivery for a while when something must stand still.
Legal holds
Sometimes the law decides about goods a company's records show: a court orders a lot held, a recall asks that part of it stops moving, an authority asks that a quantity is handed to someone else. A legal hold records that in the ledger.
- Freeze: the holder keeps the goods, but can no longer deliver, process or remove the frozen quantity. A lower quantity releases part of it; Lift the hold releases all of it.
- Move by legal order: a quantity goes from its holder to a receiver without the holder's signature. Only the receiver can send it back.
Each hold names its legal reference (court order, recall, authority request or another legal basis) and its number, and says why. The order's document can be fingerprinted; the file stays with the company. The approval reads as a sentence: "Freeze 40 kg of lot … held by …".
The compliance account
Legal holds are signed by a separate compliance account, never by the company's administration account. It belongs to the company: at least two of its own people co-sign it, each with two-factor authentication and a passkey. Where the law of the company's legal home allows A-REX to hold keys for clients, A-REX may be one extra co-signer, never alone and never needed.
Freezing and moving by legal order stay off until the compliance account exists. The rules of the company's country decide whether legal holds are allowed, and they can require them; an organization can require its companies to set up the account.
A hold is approved like any other action, then signed by enough co-signers from the approval. The request waits visibly until then, and the lot's story keeps every hold, change and release.
Stop all deliveries
Sometimes everything must stand still: a wrong lot was registered, an account may be misused, or an authority asks the company to hold all movements while it checks. Stop all deliveries does that for the whole company at once.
| While deliveries are stopped | |
|---|---|
| Stops | registering, delivering, processing and removing lots, for every holder of the company's lots; approved deliveries wait too |
| Goes on | status changes, corrections, certificates, lot rules and moves by legal order |
The company's owner or an administrator asks for it with a fresh second factor and a reason, and another of them approves it. A banner on every page of the company then says since when deliveries are stopped and why. Every member is told, and so are other companies with deliveries waiting with the company, who see that deliveries are stopped and since when, but not the reason. A reminder goes out every 24 hours while the stop lasts.
Resume deliveries ends it with the same approval; the deliveries that were waiting go ahead. The organization decides who may stop deliveries: its companies, only the organization, or nobody. A company can only be stricter.
Further reading
In the help: Legal holds, Stop all deliveries.