Do’s and Don'ts of Shredding Business Documents

When business documents are no longer needed in physical form, you must take care to properly dispose of them. The chief concerns for any business owner are twofold: 1) which documents should be shredded, and 2) how can they be shredded to minimize any associated liability to your company and its customers? While government regulations differ depending on the nature of the data, below are some quick DO’S and DON’TS to consider regardless of what you’re destroying.

First, which documents are safe and advantageous to shred under almost any circumstances?

DO shred documents which have passed their minimum retention periods. This is perhaps the most obvious, safest DO, since your business is no longer legally bound to preserve the document (depending on your regulator). The chief benefit is minimizing the liability exposure of your business in the event of a data breach. Retention periods can be set on your records management system.

A less obvious but no less important DO shred: any unsolicited paper mail your business receives containing personal information. No matter how frivolous, benign, or unrelated to your direct business such mailings might seem, an enterprising identity thief can collect and combine enough personal information from separate communications to make your life or the lives of your employees very difficult.

After establishing which documents are safe and desirable to destroy, how best to do so is up to you. What route you choose should ideally assuage concerns of compromised information - both from the perspective of your business and that of your existing and potential customers.

Even with on-premises shredding equipment, DON’T leave shredded documents in waste paper baskets or dumpsters. With enough time and manpower, unprincipled competitors or disgruntled employees could painstakingly reassemble documents to discover your business’s trade secrets or internal financials. You should always stay cautious and schedule a date where a vendor picks up all of the shredded documents.

If at all possible, DO partner with a Records management service provider with a proven track record of handling data destruction. Not only will your business likely save money at scale in the long run, you’ll be guaranteeing true industry standard compliant destruction, alleviating many privacy concerns your clients might have while maintaining the secrecy of your business’s internal workings to unscrupulous parties.

Better yet, if transporting sensitive information off-premises is deemed a hassle or an unacceptable security risk, DO find a Records Management service provider, further mitigating the potential of compromised data.

If using an off-site service to shred documents, DO be sure the company offers certificates of confirmation to easily document the data destruction in your records.

On a more practical note, partnering with a full service ECM provider will enable you to increase security an order of magnitude beyond simple destruction of documents, discs, and drives. Digitizing your company’s crucial data not only allows for selectively shared access from anywhere with an internet connection, it eliminates the pain point of shredding paper documents altogether - that is, once you’ve fully converted your existing paper filings.

Between saving money on space to physically store years of files and expediting your document searches thanks to Optical Character Recognition and intelligent indexing, you’ll also likely recoup any upfront cost in digitization quickly.

Following these best practices will ensure your customers feel confident entrusting you with their sensitive information and avoid possible legal repercussions that could easily arise from a more lax security strategy.