The dangers of destroying documents

Source: SiliconValley.com

Wells Fargo shreds teller trash. Intel rips up top-secret plans for a new chip manufacturing process. Biotech giant Chiron orders outdated packaging material destroyed so its products can't be reformulated or sold on the black market.

In the wake of the Enron debacle, whether to shred and how to do it have become as hot a topic as privacy and identity theft. While new privacy laws spurred consumers to invest in home office shredders, nothing has gotten the attention of big business like the largest corporate bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

Congressional investigators looking at the Enron collapse say there was widespread document-shredding by the company's auditors, Arthur Andersen. Just last week, FBI agents descended on Enron's corporate headquarters after a new batch of shredded documents was discovered.

For the billion-dollar shredding business -- which calls itself the ``confidential document destruction industry'' -- the heightened awareness could be good for business. But that doesn't mean it's easy to identify a good shredding policy, or stick to one. Record and information managers are already using the Enron case to point up the need for companies to establish better records management standards.