Scrap metal dealer records for commercial accounts, laid out item by item for your compliance lead.

When a plant, contractor or utility starts selling to you, someone opens the account: the business name and address, proof of how it is registered or licensed, who may deliver for it, and any letter authorizing the material it brings. Every delivery then adds a record with the date, the weight or value, a description of the metal and a signature. Your compliance lead decides which rule each account falls under and whether its file is complete.

For the test, AI reads redacted copies of those files and the tickets for their deliveries and drafts each account's record set: the items your state's rule asks for, where each one was found, and what is missing or out of date. It decides nothing about compliance and sends nothing anywhere. Each draft then goes beside the file your office actually keeps, for your reviewer to mark.

North Carolina leaves commercial vendors out. Its secondary metals recycler law says the Part does not apply to purchases from a manufacturing, industrial, government or other commercial vendor that generates or sells the metal in the ordinary course of its business. Everyone else gets an electronic record of each purchase, with the metal described by the custom of the trade and the address where the seller obtained it, kept at least two years and destroyed in a way that protects the identities in it. The draft notes what in each file shows the account is a vendor of that kind, and marks the accounts where nothing does.

Ohio wants evidence before an exemption. Its scrap dealer sections, in the text effective October 6, 2026, exempt sales between a dealer and a business that generates scrap for recycling while providing its services or maintaining its property, if the business is registered with the secretary of state, holds a vendor's license, or meets the statute's advertising test, and proves it to the dealer. A seller whose primary business makes products that leave bulk quantities of ferrous and nonferrous metal is exempt as well. The same law forbids treating a transaction as exempt without evidence of one of those exceptions, so the draft lists which proof sits in each file and the date it was collected.

Without that proof, Ohio's record is long and coded. It carries the weight from a licensed commercial scale, the plate number and issuing state of the delivery vehicle, and one of the statute's category codes, such as Number one copper, Insulated copper wire or Electronic scrap, with entries numbered in order. Railroad material is held thirty days, and a daily electronic report of the previous day's retail transactions goes to the state by noon. The draft maps each delivery's description onto one of those codes and leaves the report to your team.

Washington keeps a separate commercial account record. There, nonferrous metal bought from a commercial enterprise or its authorized employee isn't a transaction under the general record rule, whose descriptions must use the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries' terminology and are kept five years. Instead the dealer holds a permanent record for each commercial account: the enterprise's full name, business address and phone number, and the full name of the employee authorized to deliver. Each delivery adds time, date, value, the predominant types of property and the deliverer's signature, kept three years. Listed commercial metal property, from utility access covers and guardrails to unused copper building wire, parts of electric vehicle charging equipment offered for commercial or public use, and agricultural irrigation sprinkler heads, may be bought only with a commercial account, written proof of ownership or written authorization.

What your reviewer will watch, and what stays out. Is each yard's state rule the one applied? Does every file hold the proof that rule needs, with a date? Does every delivery record carry its required items and a keep-until date counted from the right day? Holds sit beside the record too: Washington has property held and tagged for up to ten business days on an officer's written notice, and North Carolina's hold notice runs 15 calendar days and can be renewed for 30 more, so the draft notes any hold on file with its end date. Driver's licenses, photographs, thumbprints, signatures and plate numbers are blacked out before any copy is sent, and the draft checks that each item is present, never what it says.

If your reviewer approves, accounts opened over the next month or so, and their deliveries, get the same check.

Your compliance lead decides every file, and any report, hold or registry entry is still made by your staff in the usual way.

Comparison keeps running on live files, and anything further is a new decision with its own price.