The Top Pitfalls of In-House Shredding

Green road sign that reads " Pitfall: Just Ahead"Are you shredding documents in house? In this blog, we examine the risks of in-house shredding and offer tips for avoiding them.

Lack of Customer Privacy

If you are a financial advisor, doctor, accountant, or manage any other type of business, your clients trust you with their personal information. Whether you handle just personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI) also, you have a responsibility to keep it secure. In-house shredding is laden with privacy gaps that put your customers’ data at risk. Sometimes, expired documents aren’t destroyed under retention requirements. Other times, they are tossed in a trash can or recycling bin. Neither way is ideal for protecting your customers’ privacy.

A secure shredding service offers your business a more secure document destruction solution. Background-screened professionals collect and destroy your documents. Chain of custody procedures are consistently followed during collection, transfer, destruction, and recycling. The entire shredding process is recorded to video and stored for 90 days.

Inefficiency

Your time is valuable. Paper shredders thwart your productivity. Shredding a document involves several steps:

  1. Remove paperclips, staples, sticky notes, cardstock and file folder or binder
  2. Separate the document into easily-shredded portions
  3. Feed the paper into the shredder
  4. Empty the shredding receptacle
  5. Clean up spilled bits of shredded material
  6. Discard the bag of shredded paper in the dumpster

Imagine if you could streamline document disposal to spend more time building your business?

A shredding service saves time while protecting your information. Your provider places security containers in your office. Whole files—including staples, paperclips, sticky notes, etc.—can be dropped into a collection container.

Depending on the volume of information your business needs to shred, security containers are collected on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, and your documents are shredded for you. A secure shredding service eliminates hours wasted standing over a paper shredder.

Non-Compliance

Secure end-of-lifecycle disposition is required by the several federal privacy laws, including:

  • HIPAA
  • FACTA
  • SOX
  • GLBA

In-house shredding doesn’t offer a verifiable document destruction solution. Professional shredding offers third-party verification of your final disposition practices. Your shredding provider gives you a Certificate of Destruction with the time, date and method of destruction. This document offers proof of your company’s compliance with state and federal regulatory requirements.

Richards & Richards offers document shredding and media destruction services for businesses throughout Nashville. For more information about our shredding services, please call us at 615-242-9600 or complete the form on this page.

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