subject: Will Shredding Paperwork Reduce Corporate Liability? [print this page] There are a number of reasons that companies decide to hire a commercial shredder to take care of their documentation shredding needs. Shredding documents is a necessity for many businesses. For one, the law in many cases requires them to shred documents. Other companies may shred for financial reasons, such as to keep storage costs to a minimum whenever possible. The reduction of corporate liability due to those laws which were already mentioned is one of the primary reasons that people shred documents though.
Companies of all kinds find it important to shred their documents in order to keep themselves compliant with all the applicable laws. This includes everything from the medical industry, to law firms, to financial advisors.
Some industries actually have more specific laws which require them to shred their documents. The most known example of this is HIPAA, which affects the medical industry. A medical company could be held liable if they were not shredding their documents regularly. This is because that law requires all such companies to have a written policy which outlines their shredding policy, and that must include regular document shredding.
The other primary reason that shredding of documents can reduce liability is because any business which has private information belonging to individual people is responsible to make sure that information is not exposes. In order to achieve that, they must shred documents regularly. This information might include things like the background or credit checks which companies regularly do as a part of the employee hiring process. They could certainly be held liable if that information was to become exposed to anyone that they had not authorized to view it.
Protection of corporate liability is something that many large companies spend a lot of time thinking about. There are many laws and loopholes which they much watch constantly in order to make sure that they cannot be the victims of malicious lawsuits. Shredding documents is one of the standard ways that legal firms advise their clients to achieve this protection.
Almost always firms prefer to outsource the task of shredding documents to a firm which specializes in this activity. This is because it can save them money due to the speed at which those commercial companies can shred documents. They usually hire companies that will come right to their location and shred everything using large industrial strength paper shredders to destroy all the paperwork in short order.
