Who needs to shred?

The risks are higher than ever and many industries are now required by federal regulation or state law to protect certain information.

By law any information found in trash is public domain?  Businesses can be held accountable for private information disposed of in an irresponsible manner.

Why take a chance?  With Paper Tiger secure document destruction you can be confident your companies documents are properly destroyed.

Why use a shredding service?

Costs of "in-house" shredding:

• Expensive labor (well-paid staff doing low-tech labor or low-paid staff handling sensitive materials)
• Payment of employee benefits for time shredding
• Shredder purchase, maintenance, repairs
• Cost of separating and preparing documents (removing staples, paper clips, binders
• Cost of disposal bags (20 to 90 cents/bag)
• Utilities and office space

No paper dust, noise, cleanup, or other shred-it-yourself headaches.  No need to sort materials for shred.

Let your employees concentrate on performing their duties, not on shredding paper.

With Paper Tiger Shredding, you just put the materials to be shredded in our secure containers and we do the rest!
 

All businesses should have a schedule for the removal and destruction of stored files.  Having a set schedule and routine for destroying old files can; help protect your company and your customers; save you the cost of long term storage facilities.

#1  
There are government regulations with which many institutions         must now comply.

• The 1974 Federal Privacy Act was established to insure that government agencies protect the privacy of businesses and of individuals.  These agencies are held liable for any information held by them which is released without authorization.
• The Supreme Court ruled in California v. Greenwood (1988)that information in the trash in considered "public information."  The court wrote: "Our conclusion is that society would not accept as reasonable (the) respondents claim to any expectation of privacy in trash left accessible to the public."
• The Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act) also addresses privacy issues.  This includes privacy provisions affecting financial institutions and insurance companies.  Statement outlined in the law were designed to compel financial institutions to 'respect the pricacy of its customers and to protect the security and confidentiality of those customers' non-public personal information.'  Language within this act suggests that paper documents containing such personal information should be protected and safely destroyed.  Secure document destruction via shredding is becoming an industry standard to comply with this act.
• The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) took effect April 14, 2001, and most health plans and healthcare providers must comply with HIPAA privacy standards by April 14, 2003.  The standard requires that covered entities put in place administrative, technical, and physical safeguards.  One example of appropriate safeguards is 'requiring that documents containing protected health information be shredded prior to disposal. Thus, although the federal rule does not specifically prescribe that protected health information on paper be shredded prior to disposal, it does cite shredding as an example of an appropriate safeguard that would meet the outlined HIPAA standard.  Experts in the healthcare field recommend shredding as the most appropriate means for the destruction of client medical records.  The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) helps set the industry standard and recommends the following
• State laws are being enacted to ensure confidentiality of personal information.  Georgia's SB475 is a law effective July 1, 2002, which makes it a crime for a business to discard personal information unless it first "shreds, erases, modifies" and makes "reasonably" sure no one will have access to it before it is destroyed.  It specifies that the information must be destroyed and there are stiff penalties for businesses that do not comply (up to $10,000).  Wisconsin passed similar legislation December 14, 1999.  Other states are looking at legislation to address this same issue and it is felt this is a growing national trend.

#2  "According to NAID Guidelines"
Recycling Is Not An Adequate Alternative For Information Destruction.

To extract the scrape value from office paper, recycling companies use unscreened, minimum wage workers, to extensively sort the paper under unsecured conditions.  The acceptable paper is stored for indefinite periods of time until there is enough of a particular type to sell.  The sorted paper, still intact, is then baled and sold to the highest bidder, often overseas, where it may be stored again for weeks or even months until it is finally used to make new products.

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 say in how it is handled. There is, also, no practical means of establishing the exact date that a record is destroyed. In the event 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.

If environmental responsibility is a concern, materials may be recycled after they are destroyed or a firm can contract a service that will destroy the materials under secure conditions before recycling them. Any recycling company that minimizes the need for security has its own interests in mind and should be avoided.

#3  "According to NAID Guidelines"
Recycling Is Not An Adequate Alternative For Information Destruction.

• Common sense dictates that payroll information and materials that involve labor relations or legal affairs, should not be entrusted to lower level employees for destruction. But, beyond that, competition sensitive information is best protected from them as well. It has been established, time and again, that employees are the most likely to realize the value of certain information to competitors. And, lower wage employees often have the economic incentive to capitalize on their access to it. The only acceptable alternatives are to have the materials destroyed under the supervision of upper management or by a carefully selected, high security service.