Spring is in the air and with the seasonal change comes the need for spring cleaning. When it comes to confidential paperwork you no longer need, you may have concerns on how to dispose of it properly and where. Luckily, Solomon Confidential Shredding (SCS) provides secure destruction services to customers in Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Hazelton, and throughout the Pocono Mountain Region. While you may want to just tear up your documents yourself, here are five reasons you should consider confidential shredding by us!
It’s The Law
Under federal data disposal laws, personal identifying information in paper format by either private or governmental entities or both are required to be destroyed, disposed of, or otherwise made unreadable or indecipherable.
Those laws include:
- The Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act, or HIPAA, requires healthcare providers to shred documents containing information on patients’ medical histories
- The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 is a mandatory compliance statute whether a financial institution discloses nonpublic information or not, there must be a policy in place to protect the information from threats in security and data integrity
- Sarbanes Oxley Act requires companies to have detailed information systems in place, including secure disposal like paper shredding, of obsolete business records.
Protect Yourself From Identity Theft
In 2017, 16.7 million individuals were victims of identity theft. Of those incidents, $16.8 billion were stolen from them. While the most common occurrence of identity fraud occurs through Social Security numbers and credit cards being stolen, when you do not dispose of your confidential paperwork correctly, your information can end up in the wrong hands.
Think of this: you get your monthly credit card statement or student loan payment in the mail. While you may not realize it, these documents contain a lot of information about you; enough information, in fact, that they may be able to open up a credit card under your name or find out about your other accounts they can attempt to access.
Storage and Fire Hazards
In a very basic way, by holding on to confidential paperwork, you have a lot of clutter, and why? There are many documents you need to hold onto for a few years, but there are also quite a few you do not. Don’t let those files and papers take up space.
If clutter doesn’t bother you, then let the risk of being a fire hazard serve as a reason. It’s true–in large facilities, paper waste poses a large fire risk. In a Waste 360 article, “More than 40 percent of waste and recycling facilities in the U.S. have experienced a fire incident within the past 12 months.” It’s an easy fix to a big problem if instead of recycling your paper, you have it shredded.
Trust
If you are an employer, you have quite a few documents on record with your employee’s personal information and documents about wage suggestions and employee reviews. By holding onto these documents, you run the risk of them landing into the wrong hands.
As an employer, it’s very possible you have a document containing employee evaluations, staff comments, and maybe even salary scales. If a suspicious employee were to access those forms, you can cause a lot of employee unrest.
Time – Shredding
Let’s be honest: shredding your own documents or manually tearing them apart is a timely process that no one has the time for. If you are in charge of confidential information, you may be required to do so. But if you are an independent person, you have bigger tasks to complete. Don’t handle your confidential document shredding on your own. Leave it to the NAID Certified Secure Destruction Specialists at Solomon Confidential Shredding take care of it.
Since 2008, SCS has established steady growth through personal service, competitive pricing, and knowledgeable assistance in establishing Information Protection Policies. Ready to shred? Contact us today.