It’s tax season. Doubtless, if you are a tax preparer, you are busy handling all kinds of forms, everything from W-2s to 1099s to 1040s … to maybe even a few TPS forms … and everything in between. It’s easy to forget, what you’ve got in your hands and on your desk is extremely valuable and, in the wrong hands, extremely dangerous.
Those papers contain personal information bearing the power to ruin your life and the lives of your clients. That’s why it’s so important to keep to these documents private. It’s why you need a shredding services provider.
Here are 6 reasons why you need onsite document shredding services:
Safeguard your clients
You’ve heard the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” There might not be a time that this adage is truer than it is now, especially when it comes to personal information.
Tax documents carry everything from social security numbers to confidential financial data. They are an identity thief’s treasure. If you don’t dispose of these papers properly — i.e. destroy them — you could be setting the lives of your clients up for ruin.
Protect yourself
Federal and state privacy laws require tax preparers to protect the personal information of their clients. As such, you must do whatever you can to safeguard their information — or risk serious fines. When it’s time to dispose of personal information of your client, whether in keeping with record retention guidelines or just to clean out the file cabinets, you must render those papers illegible. While you can do this by burning them, dropping them in a bucket of hydrochloric acid, or feeding them to the dog that ate your homework when you were a kid (if it’s still alive), shredding is the easiest and most thorough way to render those documents useless. If you don’t destroy those documents, and you just simply throw them away, those documents can come back to destroy you and your clients.
Inspire confidence in your confidentiality
Your clients and your potential clients likely know they are entrusting you with their personal information and, with their very lives. If you use a regular onsite shredding service, that service will place a locked shred bin or cabinet in your office. Positioning it in a location convenient to those who work with you and in view of your clients declares to everyone seeing it that their personal information is safe and will be kept confidential. It’s just another way to instill confidence with your clients.
3 reasons you should consider hiring a shredding service over buying an office shredder
Save time, save money
As a tax preparer, you probably already know how important it is to protect your clientele’s data and use an office shredder to destroy confidential documents. If so, that’s a gold star for you. You may want to consider though how much time you might be wasting though by feeding individual sheets our even stacks paper through your shredder. Time is money, as they say. Save yourself some money by hiring a professional onsite shredder to handle all the shredding for you so you can free yourself or coworkers to do more productive tasks.
Rest easy
By hiring an onsite shredding services company to do one-time or regularly scheduled shredding, you can be confident you and your clients are safe. You’ll be able to watch as your documents are picked up, placed in a locked bin, rolled outside to a mobile shred unit and there lifted and emptied into the hopper and finally torn to bits, never to be seen or read again. What you get is peace of mind … and that’s invaluable.
Be green
Did you know one ton of shredded and then recycled paper saves an estimated 17 tress, 380 gallons of oil, 7,000 gallons of water, 3 cubic yards of landfill space and 4,000 kilowatts of energy? Why throw away documents, even if you shred them, when you can have a mobile shredding services provider like yours truly pick them up shred them and turn the paper over to recyclers. Not only will you be protecting your clients and your business, but you’ll be helping to preserve some of the earth natural resources.
Do you need an onsite shredding services solution for your office? Let us know! Call us at 405-605-8888, tell us what you are wanting or needing for service and we’ll tell you what we can do.
About R.K. Black, Inc.
R.K. Black, Inc. is an Oklahoma City-based, family-owned leading provider of office technology solutions to small and medium-sized businesses in Oklahoma and Kansas. We specialize in everything business technology from copier, fax, printer and scanner technology to document management, onsite paper shredding services, VoIP phone systems and managed IT support to video surveillance solutions.
If you want to learn more about us, feel free to explore the website, read our other blogs or click the button below to be contacted by one of our reps and tell you! Also, be sure to keep watching our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter for more business tips from our blog.
