Gregg Bossen, a CPA in Atlanta, should be spending his day starting a shredding service. His original plan of hoping his employees would assign themselves the extra work of shredding didn’t work so well. Instead of wasting hours with an office shredder they just left personal tax documents in the trash. They were found by someone looking to recycle boxes. Now he has to answer to the media and police about a data breach. [video]

The numbers are easy to compute: it takes an employee at least three hours to shred a box of documents. At a pay rate of $13/hour that is $39 per box. Then you add in the cost of the shredder, its maintenance, and regular replacement the cost grow. Since we don’t know the costs of the loss in clients and fines when they fail to do the job we won’t add those in. Compared to a shredding service in Atlanta that will charge less than $7 per box it just doesn’t make sense to do the work in house.