Document Destruction

Accounting, in particular forensic accounting (where accounting and investigative practices are used to trace the sometimes deliberately clandestine movement of finances from person to person and within an organization), can be concerned with paperwork and other documents that can be destroyed. The task of document reconstruction in a forensic investigation may be onerous but is not necessarily impossible.

Even documents stored on a computer may circulate as hard copy, and these, combined with other paper items such as phone messages, notes, memoranda, and other items, can be valuable forensic evidence. Those seeking to hide a paper trail have increasingly turned to document destruction, a security solution long applied by government agencies. Document destruction can be achieved with paper shredders, burn boxes, and other forms of technology, often in industrial facilities dedicated to that purpose.

Stories of document destruction by businesses and public officials regularly appear in the media. In 2002, as a scandal erupted around Enron Corporation for falsifying records of earnings, it was revealed that Arthur Andersen LLP, the accounting firm that had helped Enron falsify its books, had shredded literally tons of documents.

Forensic evidence can be obtained from a crude attempt at document destruction such as disposal of paperwork in the trash. Once garbage is placed on the curb for pickup, the discarded information is easily obtained by someone dedicated enough to pick through the garbage.

In the 1990s, garbage-combing thieves earned the colorful appellation of "dumpster diver." Private detectives, for purposes either laudatory or malign, also obtain a great deal of their information from trash. (So, too, do law-enforcement officers, including forensic specialists who take advantage of the fact that material an individual has discarded is open to search without a warrant.).

The best methods of document destruction take place on an industrial scale. The document destruction industry, which primarily serves corporate clients, is estimated to generate __BODY__.5 billion a year in revenue. Whereas only about two dozen companies nationwide were in operation in the early 1980s, by 2002 that number had risen to about 600.

Document shredding, which particularly came to national attention in the wake of the Enron debacle, is only one of many methods of document destruction, though it is the one most frequently used. As a report in the Wall Street Journal noted, "For routine destruction work, many companies use shredding services because even heavy-duty office-model shredders tend to choke on anything thicker than about 50 pages—and can be stopped dead in their tracks by a binder clip."

By contrast, the shredders at a facility such as that of American Document Security Corporation (ADS) in Brooklyn, New York, are capable of chewing through 20 tons of documents an hour. Clients of such companies range from law and consulting firms to investment banks, hospitals, and many others.

Though document shredding is probably as old as the concept of written documents, shredding by machine dates back to the 1920s, when an American inventor developed the first shredder from a Bavarian noodle cutter. Today's shredders are far more efficient than those used even in 1979, when the students who took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, were able to piece together documents shredded by embassy personnel.

Some shredders are known as disintegrators. Often used for destroying CD ROMs, circuit boards, and other items containing computerized data, the disintegrators chop up materials into a fine dust that can be sifted through a screen at the bottom of the machine. Another variation on the shredder, inasmuch as it destroys documents by purely physical (rather than chemical or electromagnetic) means, is a hammer-and-mill device, which beats paper quite literally to a pulp.

Paper that has been put through industrial shredders and hammer-and-mill devices often is recycled. Waste-to-energy plants burn paper waste at temperatures as high as 2,200°F (1,204°C).

For burning documents on a smaller scale—especially documents for which security is an extremely high concern—a burn box may be used. Actually, the purpose of the burn box is not to destroy documents per se, but to destroy documents discovered by the wrong people. Inside the box, a sturdy metal container, is a volatile chemical mixture attached to a tamper-sensitive switch. If someone opens the box in an unauthorized manner, the chemicals turn the pages to ash.

An intriguing variety of document destruction can be used for electronic media such as CD-ROMs, hard drives, floppies, and so on. This is a degausser, which applies electromagnetic energy to rearrange particles of information contained on a magnetic field. Used either in the form of a stationary box or a hand-held wand, a degausser removes information permanently, leaving the storage device free to be used again.