Hi Robert. So is your conjecture that, if payments are made after account closure, then a CRA might permit the account to stay on longer? For example, a card closed in June 2004, but the person takes an additional three years to pay off the balance... you are wondering if the account might then stay on until roughly June 2017? Just want to make sure I understand you right.
This is in contrast to an account closed with a zero balance in June 2004 -- which would in your view be more likely to fall off around June 2014.
Did that apply in your case (on the account that stayed on for 15 years)? I.e. were you still making payments after the account closed, posibly for years? Do you happen to remember when the account was opened?
The problem with a CRA implementing a ten year rule loosely is that there is no way to tell a computer to do something loosely. A human can do something loosely -- hey Bob, clean up the downstairs every once in a while, would you? -- which might result in Bob doing it every couple weeks, then forgetting, then deciding that his wife was getting on his case again, etc. But a computer can't do that. So I am trying to see if there was some explanation that might cover the cases where an account stays on for far longer. My own thinking is to lean toward a bug in older data: e.g. the CRA migrates from one database to another and something gets screwed up, where the deletion routine can't see that this particular account is > 10 years old.
I like your suggestion (if I understand it right) which is that if someone was researching this here he should solicit from people who had very old closed accounts not only Date Opened, Date Closed, and which CRA, but also when the account was paid to zero.
