Cintas has announced the acquisition of Certo Information Management. Certo is a Dutch document shredding and records storage business. This makes it clear that Cintas has Iron Mountain square in their sights.

In other Cintas news, they also reported a 5% drop in income in fiscal first quarter ending August 31st. Income for the company was $81.1 million.

The University of Kansas is investigating an allegation that a math department employee routinely threw out student information with the trash. The details are like so many other stories reported on this blog. An employee is too lazy to shred so personal information is left in the trash. I am willing to bet a shredding service that provides convenient locked bins around the office would have saved the University a great deal of money and embarrassment. The could also reduce the headcount of the employees who only shred some of the necessary documents.

Las Vegas Police are only the latest department called out to dumpster for personal records. The dumpster contained the personal information of the clients Century 21. The office manager claimed ignorance and said they were in the process of moving.

This is just another case of employees failing to shred their customers personal information. Paper shredders are a security risk to any business.

Details of the case.

If you live in the city of Converse, a suburb of San Antonio Texas you might expect them to properly shred your personal information. However, you would be wrong. Instead of using a shredding service to efficiently destroy the information they have decided to just bury it in the park. This is an amazing choice since they could at least sell the paper for recycling. Another example of the great decisions that bureaucrats make.

Farmers Insurance leaves the job of shredding the personal information of its customers to unsupervised, low level employees. The result: a dumpster full of customer records turned up in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas. It should be no surprise that when faced with the boring job of shredding an unsupervised employee will take the easy way out and just throw them in the dumpster.

Farmers Insurance can either implement a policy where all shredding is supervised and documented, hire a shredding service, or get someone who can keep answering these questions of why they don't care about their customers.

Waxahachie High School principal David Nix spent the morning digging in the dumpster. He was pulling out student records that were thrown away instead of being shredded. The records were discovered by a resident and the local media was contacted. David Nix described the incident and "embarrassing" and said he would work to prevent this from happening in the future.

This is just another example of someone relying on a shredder.

The state of Ohio has found personal information in the dumpster outside of a motor vehicles office. It makes you wonder how much shredders that never run cost?

See the video.

Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter filed complaints August 31st with the Indiana Pharmacy Board against 14 Indianapolis-area pharmacies and 14 individual pharmacists for failing to protect sensitive patient medical information. The complaints claim that the pharmacies threw documents with personal information into unsecured dumpsters. The documents included Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare details.

The actions of these pharmacies also represent a violation of HIPAA laws.

A shredding service would have saved these pharmacies a great deal of bad press and any impending fines.