What to Shred in Illinois

Once you allow information to leave your possession, you open yourself or your business up to risk any time you carelessly discard a document with sensitive information on it. Businesses in Illinois can face lawsuits on the grounds of mishandled information, even if the sharing of that information was entirely accidental.

Narrowing down the list of documents to shred can be a difficult task, which is why we provide a list of documents we think are worth your consideration.

Types of Documents You Should Shred

Legal

1. Contracts
2. Legal correspondence
3. Records from your Insurance Agency
4. Expired Contracts and Legal Documents

Employee-related information

1. Outdated medical records
2. Job applications
3. All Payroll documents
4. Personnel issues including performance appraisals and disciplinary reports.
5. Anything with employee addresses and personal information
6. Training manuals

Hard Drives and Electronic Media Devices

1. Fax machines, scanners, copiers, and printers
2. Mobile devices like cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, tablets and laptops
3. Legacy magnetic media like floppy drives, zip disks and magnetic tapes
4. PC hard drives
5. Optical media, including CDs and DVDs
6. USB removable media such as pen drives, thumb drives, flash drives and sticks
7. Memory cards, including SD, SDHC, MMC, compact flash, microdrive and memory sticks
8. Embedded flash on boards and devices, including motherboards and peripheral cards such as network adapters or any other adapter containing non volatile flash memory
9. RAM and ROM-based storage devices
10. Biomedical devices such as physiologic monitors, infusion pumps, ventilators, MRI, CT, and diagnostic ultrasound and laboratory analyzers

Operations

1. Corporate records
2. Purchase Orders
3. Proprietary Data
4. Supplier Lists
5. Procurement Requests

Accounting

1. Budgets
2. Bank Statements
3. Internal accounting reports
4. Customer lists
5. A/R and A/P printouts
6. Unused Checks
7. Credit Card Statements and Receipts

Sales

1. Prospect lists
2. Customer lists
3. Drafts of sales strategies
4. Marketing related documents

Businesses should create a compilation of the types of records that should be shredded.