To step away from Texas for a post; boxes of personal documents have turned up in an apartment complex dumpster in Deerfield Township, Kentucky. Police are investigating the origin of the documents. I will let you know more as the story develops.

I have written several article about the security risks of shredders. The latest victim to think that employees will assign themselves the drudgery of shredding is Labor for Hire in Lake Worth, Florida. Boxes full of their customer's information was found in a dumpster behind the office.

According to company owner, Vern Vokus, "This individual walked past the shredder walked into the dumpster with the trash bag and threw it out." It is no surprise to me as this is a tale repeated many times a month. Every shredding program must have documentation. This can either be done by having a manager supervise the entire shredding process or hire a shredding service who will provide the documentation. It is hard to think how paying two people to shred can save any money over a service with a machine that will do 5,000 pounds an hour.

Authorities in DC have discovered a dumpster full of real estate transactions. The documents contained bank information, salary information and Social Security numbers. It is unknown who dumped the boxes but the company that owned them is no longer in business.

What is becoming obvious is that the mortgage crisis is driving many mortgage companies into bankruptcy. When this happens all their customer's personal information in the trash for the world to discover. Lets hope the mortgage crisis doesn't end up starting an identity theft crisis.

Last week we reported on William Weber, a Houston attorney who was too cheap to hire a shredding service to protect his clients, or even pay for disposal, and left boxes and boxes of personal information in a dumpster of a day care center.

I can't speak to his ability as an attorney but it seems like he should know that this is against the Texas ID Theft Act. Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott is now investigating the violation.

E.F. Mortgage of Portage recently went out of business and left all of their customers information in the trash. The only solution is for bankruptcy officers and courts to allow business to shred sensitive information. Unfortunately, this comes on the back of the businesses creditors. The good news is the secure shredding of the documents is only a small amount.

This is second story from Houston of personal records being left for anyone to find. This time it was Supreme Builders who left home sales documents in an unfinished house. It is ironic that a city that Enron made famous for shredding too much is now in the news for not shredding enough.

I don't want to belittle what happened but the local news may have gone over the top with the video of the people digging through the files.

We might have a winner for the cheapest attorney in Houston. William Weber not just dumped his clients personal information in the trash for anyone to find but he was even to cheap to pay for the dumpster. He had his wife leave them behind a daycare. When asked if he should be required to protect his clients personal information he didn't think so.

This isn't the first lawyer who has used the "go ahead and sue me" approach to shirking their responsibilities. I am guessing a paper shredding service would be less than what he charges per hour. See the video.

Iron Mountain conducted a survey of the state of shredding in business today. I am not sure of the methodology but they did provide one great statistic:

74 percent of respondents say they were familiar with the federal requirements for shredding. However, only 30 percent of the respondents were aware of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA). This is the most comprehensive of all the federal laws that cover the proper destruction on personal information.

Beware if you ever applied to Parliament Pub in Omaha. They require you to put your social security number on their application and then just throw them in the trash. The applications were found and turned over to the local media. It is unknown how long the practice had been going on before they were discovered.

For the amount of paperwork that a pub has to shred they could use a service like Ship 'n' shred for a few bucks a month.

If you don't want a rant please skip this post.

I read a press release today that Mike Boehringer and Mike West had launched a new company today called 3GS, LLC. Their goal is to "form the largest independent document destruction company." It sounds nice enough but if you are the largest you are no longer an independent by most peoples use of independent. Is Shred-it an Independent? How about Iron Mountain? If not then where do you draw the line. Is it 5 locations? 20? 200? What if it was one shredding location operated by Haliburton? Is that independent?

I think it is time to stop using the word independent altogether. It is meaningless marketing gobbly gook.

Now go have a great 4th of July Holiday.


Update on 7/9

3GS has acquired Safe Shredding of Mobile, AL. I would say they are no longer independent.