Types of Service

Information Protection

Information Protection Is A Vital Issue To Senior Management.

In a survey conducted by the Conference Board, top executives from 300 companies ranked the security of company records as one of the top five critical issues facing business. When asked which issues required immediate attention and policy development, the security of company records ranked second only to employee health screening.

Scheduled destruction

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. 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, the new >Federal Rule 26< requires that, in the event of a law suit, each party provide all relevant records to the opposing counsel within 85 days of the defendants initial response. If either of the litigants does not fulfill this obligation, it will result in a summary finding against them.

By destroying records according to a set schedule, a company appropriately limits the amount of materials it must search though 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.

Daily trash protection

Protect Incidental Business Records Discarded Daily.

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. All businesses suffer potential exposure due to the need to discard these incidental business records. The only means of minimizing this exposure is to make sure such information is securely collected and destroyed.

Who destroys what?

Internal Personnel Should Not Destroy Certain Information.

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.