Tax Time Means Paper Shredding Time!
April 10, 2017
OK, before we get accused inciting any illegal activity, we definitely don’t mean you should do any troops-at-the-door-of-the-dictator’s-palace type of frantic shredding of your tax documents.
Especially for home-based businesses and sole proprietorships, tax time is often also the only time of the year when you review your tax-related documents, including receipts, invoices and government documents, and actually get things in order.
And that’s a good thing. Once they are in order, you can store them according to how long they will need to be kept. While you might need to keep some tax documents for over seven years, you should hang on to all your corporate documents for at least three years.
What Documents Can You Shred?
Getting your documents in order is a good thing, but finding a place to store them is not always so good. And the longer you keep them beyond their schedule for destruction, the longer they pose a security risk to your sensitive business information.
So it makes sense, while you’re assembling this year’s documents and getting them ready for storage, to look for any older documents that you can destroy.
Why Shredding is the Way To Go
As we said, any document, regardless of its age, can carry sensitive information that, in the wrong hands, could be damaging to you or your business. A simple bank statement has your complete name and address (often all that’s needed for an identity thief to make off with who you are), bank account information, what you bought, how much you make, and so on.
But even if you use an office shredder, it doesn’t ensure that the information on the document can’t be reassembled. Most commercial office shredders do not cut paper into small enough pieces to make all the information on it undecipherable.
Only certified destruction by shredding your documents to NAID ‘AAA’ standards ensures that your paperwork and any information on it is indeed destroyed.
