Document Retention Compliance
In today’s world with the rising number of identity theft cases, Federal and State regulations are very strict in terms of document handling and destruction. This is especially true for the medical, financial, and legal fields.
These regulations and retention compliance guidelines are built to protect personal information. However, as with anything in this world, the laws must update to keep up with the criminals and can easily become difficult to navigate.
Some of these regulations and retention compliance guidelines include:
- HIPAA: passing in 1996, this law regulates Personal Health Information, or PHI. This law put regulations in place to protect the patients’ private records as well as to prohibit the sharing of these records. Medical offices and healthcare professionals need to take great care in hiring a HIPAA compliant document shredding company so as to not face large fines.
- FACTA: The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act is an all-encompassing law which enforces business of all sizes, even those employing one person, to shred all personnel-related documents before throwing them out in order to try to prevent dumpster divers from capturing sensitive, personal information. Unlike the other regulations, this one is not industry specific.
- RED FLAG: This is a law issued by the FTC, NCUA, and the federal bank regulatory agencies as part of the FACTA regulation was created to help stop identity theft. The law requires financial organizations and creditors to create written theft prevention programs.
- GRAMM LEACH BLILEY ACT: this law, signed in 1999, is also known as the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, requires financial organizations to provide customers with written privacy notices that explain the information sharing practices of the organization. It is broken into three parts, Privacy, Safeguards, and Pretexting Provisions. Of these, the Safeguards Rule states that financial organizations have certain security programs and protocols to protect the private information that they gather.