|
Because It's The Law!
Shredding is required in many industries to meet legal standards for document protection.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that you forfeit the right of ownership to discarded information. This means that courts will not recognize trade information protections if a company can be shown to have disposed of such information without shredding it first. Click here for a list of documents that must be properly destroyed before discarding, under current Federal and state regulations.
Industries such as banking, finance, human resources, insurance, and medicine are especially affected by new regulations designed to protect against information theft. The following regualtions may apply to your company:
-
-
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996
-
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) of 1999
-
-
The Economic Espionage Act of 1996
RECYCLING
Recycling is not an adequate alternative for information destruction. Simply put, recycling services cannot guarantee confidentiality. To extract the scrap value from office paper, recycling companies use unscreened low wage workers to extensively sort the material under unsecured conditions. There is no fiduciary responsibility inherent in the recycling scenario. If something of a private nature surfaced, the selection of this unsecured process could be interpreted as negligent. Recycling as a means of information disposal is not worth the risk of minimizing the need of security over a free or low price method that has only a non-responsible party's interest in mind.
IN-HOUSE SHREDDING
If you currently operate a shredder in-house, your internal cost is extremely high. If a company shreds one cubic foot (1 bankers box) per week internally at $10.00 per hour, they will be paying about $2800.00 a month in labor to do the shredding! Which means Polar Shredding can save you at least 50%! Internal personnel should not be responsible to destroy certain information. Legal affairs, payroll information, employee reviews, and accounting records are just a few that should remain confidential. If employees are forced to destroy such information, it could allow practices that could legally render profound opportunities. According to federal law enforcement statistics, employees or ex-employees commit over 70%of all corporate crimes.
RECORD STORAGE FACILITIES
The National Association of Information Destruction (NAID) found most record storage facilities offer destruction services to their customers but many of those firms were lacking equipment or security practices or both. Finding it to be a common practice to subcontract the destruction of records. In many cases, some firms were found misleading their customers by charging for secure records destruction while the materials were being sold to a recycling company for scrap or giving the paper to brokers for their profit just to extract it from their possession without cost. Any business using a record storage service should not allow any information to be designated destroyed other than by a contractor they choose after the data has been audited first, then securing the chain of custody until it is witnessed being destroyed. This procedure is essential in the event of litigation.
|
