Privacy is a wonderful thing, except when unscrupulous businesses try to hide behind it. At the Better Business Bureau, we are seeing increased efforts to invoke customer privacy and confidentiality as a smokescreen to camouflage customer service screw-ups. It is nothing more than customer service crocodile tears.

Businesses in the health care sector such as doctors, dentists, chiropractors along with hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and the like are the greatest abusers in this regard. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) casts a large confidentiality net.

HIPAA is part of the reason your pharmacy had to build another window for prescriptions counseling. HIPAA is why you’re asked to stand a ways back from the doctor’s reception counter until it’s your turn, so you can’t overhear other people’s private health concerns and they can’t eavesdrop on yours.

HIPAA is part of the reason the computer screens at the clinic or pharmacy counters are turned so you can’t see them.

Any non-clinical consumer complaint can be addressed through BBB’s complaint conciliation process. Financial and billing information is covered under HIPAA. When patients complain to BBB about a billing error, medical providers give us a lot of "Sorry, can’t respond. HIPAA, you know. You’ll have to bring us a confidentiality release." This is bull. They can respond.

They should respond.

Their customer has already broken half of the confidentiality equation by lodging a complaint with BBB. If the healthcare business possesses one iota of customer service good faith, they will secure the HIPAA release from their customer and staple it to their response to BBB. Anything else is hiding behind confidentiality requirements to disguise botched customer service at best, or criminal misdeeds at worst.

What HIPAA is to the medical community, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is to most other segments of the business community.

I got a huge laugh recently out of a Tucson company’s pathetic attempt to hunker behind Sarbanes-Oxley’s confidentiality requirements to avoid answering a consumer complaint forwarded by BBB.

Strike one: They had their lawyer send the response. That has to be $250 to $300 flushed away if the guy charges any kind of respectable hourly rate.

Strike two: The lawyer’s letter erroneously invoked Sarbanes-Oxley, as the reason the company was "regretfully precluded" (oh, puleeeze!) from answering the complaint. Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t apply to small, family-owned businesses that are not traded publicly.

Strike three: If the company’s ownership and management felt the slightest bit of commitment to authentic customer service and genuinely believed it needed a confidentiality release to reply to their customer’s complaint through BBB, then the company would have asked the customer for the privacy release and attached it to their response.

Are you seeing the pattern here? If you get a complaint through BBB, you can run but you can’t hide behind hypocritical bloviating about your customer’s privacy. If you really believe your company needs a confidentiality release from a customer, get one. It’s your job. It’s not BBB’s job.

The Internet and other factors have changed the nature of customer service.

Now, genuine customer service is how you listen and how you respond.

Remember, you don’t control your company’s reputation any more.

Too many companies base their customer service policies on Groucho Marx’s quip: "The secret to success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you’ve got it made."

If your company pursues a "Marxist" customer service policy, the Internet, social networking, word of mouth, and "buzz" all help existing customers and potential customers to see through you.

It is so much less work to be honest, rather than to try to fake it.

Contact Tom Collier, president of the Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona, at tcollier@tucson.bbb.org, (520) 888-5353 or 1-800-696-2827 toll-free outside of Tucson. The BBB of Southern Arizona serves Pima, Cochise, Santa Cruz, Graham, and Greenlee counties in Arizona and all of the state of Sonora in Mexico. The office is at 434 S. Williams Blvd., Suite 102. The website is: http://www.tucson.bbb.org. Collier’s On Guard column appears the first week of each month in Inside Tucson Business.