IN THE wake of HIPAA and Graham-Leach-Bliley, agencies are increasingly sensitive about their responsibility to protect their clients' privacy. Recent news stories have shown the damage that can be done to a company's reputation when it announces that its confidential information about individual consumers has been stolen or "hacked." If you haven't given this issue much attention, it may be time to take a look at practical solutions for protecting information.

An item in a Syracuse, N.Y., newspaper recently showed the potential danger of improperly handling confidential information. Participating in the city's recycling program, an insurance agency routinely put its discarded paper on the curb for a weekly recycling pick-up. A reporter rummaged through the agency's recycling container, as anyone could have, and confronted the agency after finding several confidential documents in the stack. Could this happen at your agency?

With this concern in mind, we considered buying a paper shredder when shredders first became available. We delayed our purchase for several reasons, including the fact that shredded paper requires more space for disposal. We participated in our community's recycling program, which required us to bring paper to a bin at a central recycling center. We derived some comfort from the security of the bin at the recycling center, as well as from the knowledge that the bin was transported directly to a regional landfill in a rather remote, rural location, where its contents were processed.