Why You Should Hire a Professional Document Shredding Company This Tax Season
Why You Should Hire a Professional Document Shredding Company This Tax Season
With tax season coming to a close, it’s time to think about the Spring Cleaning of your confidential documents. Typically, it’s good business process to hang onto old tax records, but how long you keep them differs for businesses versus personal income tax filing. According to the IRS, you only need to keep records supporting income or deductions on a return until the period of limitations for that return is up.
What are some of the standard limitations on tax-related documents? If you owe, you should keep records for three years. If you file a loss due to bad debt deduction, hang onto your records for seven years.
Knowing how long you should hang onto your tax records is the first step to good book keeping, but what happens when you’re ready to dispose of your older records? This is when it’s time to consider professional document shredding.
Some businesses think it’s a good idea to invest in a large-scale paper shredder for the office, but what decision makers do not realize is that having an in-house employee perform shredding duties means you open yourself to potential security breaches. Tax documents often contain sensitive information, so improperly disposing of these documents without destroying their content poses a risk to personal and corporate security.
No matter how trustworthy your employees are, assigning the job of shredding private documents to an individual grants him or her access to confidential information. An office shredder in no way assures the same accuracy and security that you obtain when a professional shredding company, like LegalShred, handles the job for you.
LegalShred saves you money in the long run; there are no machine maintenance costs, and of course the expense of having an employee spend time destroying documents is no longer a concern. When hiring a professional shredding service, you retain secure and safe document destruction, as it is our business to ensure there are no security breaches. All businesses have a legal obligation to follow privacy laws, which means properly managing and disposing all sensitive information in an effort to avoiding litigation or fines levied.
In this day and age, it’s all too easy for potential identity thieves to find and steal documents that have been stored insecurely or thrown in the trash or recycling bin. It’s time to schedule a paper shredding service for your old tax documents and stay safe this tax season.