Information Security

One day, I noticed a loan processor discarding documents into an ordinary trash bin. Knowing the sort of personal information contained in these documents, I retrieved the documents from the trash and looked them over. Over the course of the next several days, I noticed general practice by everyone was to discard loan documentation as ordinary trash.

I raised this as an issue and was asked to procure services of an onsite shredding company. A company named "Shred It" was contracted with for what I seem to recal was about $65/month and they installed a large document shred bin on each floor of the office. A shredder truck would show up monthly and I accompanied the driver-operator to the truck to visually verify that all documents from the shredding bins went into the shredder.

Watching the shredder in action was fairly impressive. Once all the documents had been shredded, I signed for a shred receipt and gave the receipt to accounting. With few exceptions, I verified all shredding -- not that it was my preference but that's just how it worked out.

As the market turned increasingly sour, the volume of material to be shredded decreased and office grade shredders were purchased to replace the service. Never-the-less, once shred bins and later shredders were installed, employees did a good job of seeing to it that sensitive and confidential information was shredded.