Need for Service

The Need For Service

1.) Every Business Has Information That Requires Management
	All businesses have occasion to discard or store confidential data. Customer lists, price lists, sales statistics, drafts of bids and correspondence, and even memos, all contain information about business activity which would interest any competitor. Every business is also entrusted with information that must be kept private. Employees and customers have the legal right to have this data protected. Without the proper safeguards, information ends up in the dumpster where it is readily, and legally, available to anybody. The trash is considered by business espionage professionals as the single most available source of competitive and private information from the average business. Any establishment that discards private and proprietary data without the benefit of destruction, exposes itself to the risk of criminal and civil prosecution, as well as the costly loss of business. Due diligence in selecting a records storage or imaging company may also produce risks associate with disclosure of confidential information.
2.) Stored Records Should Be Destroyed On A Regular Schedule.
	The period of time that business records are stored should be determined by a retention schedule that takes into consideration their useful value to the business and the governing legal requirements. No record should be kept longer than this retention period. Many storage firms charge extra fees for you to destroy your own records with pull fees or perm-out fees. They want you to keep the records on their shelves for ever, paying the storage fees. By not adhering to a program of routinely destroying stored records, a company exhibits suspicious disposal practices that could be negatively construed in the event of litigation or audit. Also, Federal Rule 26 requires that, in the event of a law suit, each party provide all relevant records to the opposing counsel with 85 days of the defendants initial response. If either litigants does not fulfill this obligation, it will result in a summary response. By destroying records according to a set schedule, a company appropriately limits the amount of materials it must search through to comply with this law. From a risk management perspective, the only acceptable method of discarding stored records is to destroy them by a method that ensures that the information is obliterated. Documenting the exact date that a record is destroyed is a prudent and recommended legal precaution.
3.) Incidental Business Records Discarded On A Daily Basis Should Be Protected.
	Without a program to control it, the daily trash of every business contains information that could be harmful. This information is especially useful to competitors because it contains the details of current activities. Discarded daily records include phone messages, memos, misprinted forms, drafts of bids and drafts of correspondence - are all targets of "Dumpster Divers."
4.) Recycling IS NOT An Adequate Alternative For Information Destruction!
	To extract the scrap value from office paper, recycling companies use unscreened, minimum wage workers, to extensively sort the paper under unsecured conditions. One east Texas community recycling operation even uses prison labor! The acceptable paper is stored for indefinite periods of time until there is enough of a particular type to sell. The sorted paper, often still intact, is then baled and sold to the highest bidder. Some shredding companies are actually recycling operations and use the destruction business as a means to increase their paper volumes where their true profits are made. There is no fiduciary responsibility inherent in the recycling scenario. Paper is given away or sold and, by doing so, a company gives up the right of say in how it is handled. There is, also, no practical means of establishing the exact date that a record is destroyed. In the advent of an audit or litigation, this could be a legal necessity. And, further, if something of a private nature does surface, the selection of this unsecured process could be interpreted as negligent. For all these reasons, the choice of recycling as a means of information destruction is undesirable from a risk management perspective. Which is exactly why, in Texas, a governmental agency must first render the information unrecognizable as a government document before selling or giving it to a recycler.