While I appreciate the notion that companies should automatically back-track through their repair orders, this isn’t a straightforward option as you may think. Firstly, we’re missing all the timeline details such as 1) when was the car first put on the road (in service date), 2) when did the problem first appear, 3) when was the problem corrected, and 4) when was the recall issued? This car is potentially 9 years old, as much as 8 years old when the poster claims to have started “working with the dealership”. When a recall is issued it only affects certain cars within a model range as not all VINs were necessarily affected (eg; perhaps they changed power steering pumps partway through model production and either the old or the new, but not both, exhibit the problem). Further, because the labour job was “Customer Pay”, and most likely (again, no timeline data) done outside of BMW/Mini warranty – the manufacturer would have no records on file. When the customer learned of the recall he/she should have contacted the dealer and/or the manufacturer and taken steps from there. It would be quite logistically difficult to set up a system that retro-actively searches through all dealers’ service records every time a recall is issued.