In the early 90's I was doing Underground Storage Tank investigation and clean up work. If you waited for a positive response from the State Regulators to your work plan to begin work you would have been the Maytag Repairman in a booming industry. We routinely used this technique with the State Agencies with no problems; as long as what you were trying to do was reasonable they were fine with it. I submit to you that this was a far more weighty issue in every respect than a 2 year old SFR appraisal report for a defunct lender. Besides, who's confidentially are you protecting? Is it even possible to protect the confidentiality of a non-entity? I could also argue that with the expiration of the named client, the home owner/payer of the appraisal is the next logical entity to assume assignment right of the appraisal.
They've yet to write a law that covers every conceivable eventuality; that's why after 230 years we still have a very busy USSC. At some point where the applicability of the law falls short you have to go on with common sense, reasonableness, and hopefully a clear understand of the intent of what the law was trying to accomplish. I submit that the confidentiality clause in USPAP was never intended to bar the owner from access to the report under these circumstances. What is obvious and clear is that the law does intend that the owner/payer have access to the report; the limitations on that (upon request w/in 90 days) seem mostly bureaucratic, not based on some principal of confidentiality; if the owner/payer had requested and received that report initially, they would still have it. Furthermore. if the client was still in business, do you have an reason to believe they would deny the owner/payer access to the report?
We've got a lot of laws in this country, but the fact of the matter is you can violate pretty much any of them without repercussion, up to and including murder, if you can articulate a reasonable reason why you did what you did.
