Identity Theft Articles

New Jersey may suffer from jokes about everything from its many suburbs to its residents’ accents, but one thing it can’t be mocked for is its attention to identity theft. For more than a year now, New Jersey has had one of the strongest identity theft laws in the nation - one that expands the rights of consumers, as well as the responsibilities of businesses in data storage and financial record shredding.

After a thorough debate throughout much of 2005, the New Jersey state assembly passed that state’s Identity Theft Protection Act, which came into effect on the first day of 2006. Under the law, consumers may request security freezes on their credit reports, better protect personal information in their credit records, and file a police report when they suspect identity theft.

“The risk of identity theft continues to rise as weaknesses in data reporting and storage are exploited on a daily basis,” Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, who introduced the law, told the Philadelphia Business Journal. Despite some political resistance, the bill passed with widespread support.

Document Destruction: The New Rules

The law also requires businesses collecting consumer information to engage in proper document destruction - which means more than simply deleting a consumer’s personal information from a hard drive. Often this means bringing on the expertise of a qualified document shredding firm to eliminate every form, receipt and duplicate copy containing sensitive information.

The new law has been a boon to document shredding services in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, who are commonly charged with financial and medical record shredding. In many cases, though, the new law also meant such document destruction companies also had to re-evaluate their privacy practices to make sure they were in line with the new law.

Fortunately, the new identity protection law’s specifics were similar to those outlined by other laws dictating consumer privacy, such as the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Financial Modernization Act (GLB).

Many of these laws require any businesses collecting private consumer information to enact a due-diligence search for high-quality document destruction services; it’s not always enough to simply have a shredder in the office. Document destruction services often use high-powered mega-shredders that run through paper, file folders, binder clips and rubber bands like a blue whale through a school of plankton.

A state or federally mandated due-diligence search often requires seeking references and asking specific questions about a document shredding firm’s methods and privacy considerations. The best shredding services will offer some kind of certification insuring that the documents have been destroyed, and this can range from a signed guarantee to a video recording of the process from start to finish.