Paper and data security for professionals who handle sensitive client information

If you are in a profession in which you collect paperwork on your clients – for example, an accountant, attorney, financial advisor, or psychotherapist -- you may have paperwork in your home that could cause a lot of trouble if it fell into the wrong hands. 

At this point, we all know someone who has been a victim of identity theft. One friend of mine found that his tax refund had been directed to someone else’s account. It took him several years to collect the funds. Another friend’s email account was broken into. Posing as her, the hacker sent an email to her financial advisor and directed that a large sum of money be transferred to a new account.

It is hard to believe now, but our social security numbers used to appear on all kinds of paperwork. We have come across countless boxes of old pay stubs collected by our clients, with their social security number displayed right at the top of each stub. Some bank statements and medical records used to include them too.

I wish the IRS would find a way to encrypt our social security numbers on their documents, but they still appear on W-2s and on forms that need to be signed and submitted each year to process taxes.

The only solution is to stay on top of papers as we collect them, and not let the stacks of paper ever get so large that we lose control over them. 

Debby and Stan’s son, Mark, hired us to clear out a lot of the stuff that had accumulated in their Brooklyn home because he planned to renovate it for them. He intended to convert part of the ground floor into a large bedroom with a bathroom so they could eventually live entirely on this floor and not have to worry about stairs. This would allow Debby and Stan to age in place and avoid having to move in the future.

It was a great idea and we were happy to work with them. They were attached to their things, but they were not hoarders. Just heavy collectors. The main problem was that they ran their joint accounting practice out of the house and the business files had taken over a lot of space.

Stan was using what was once a beautiful formal dining room as his office, and Debby was using an enclosed porch that must have once been a lovely place to have breakfast, as hers. Both workspaces were packed with files, but the files in these workspaces were no match for the files in the basement. There, they had stored more than forty years of files from former and present clients. 

As we toured the basement the first time, I could see, without opening a single box or file, the names and social security numbers for many of their clients. They were scattered all over the place, in random piles.

I quickly realized how easy it would be for anyone entering the house to collect -- without much trouble at all-- enough private information on these clients to get away with some lucrative identity theft. 

As we worked with them, both Debby and Stan could see the need to shred all past client files and to secure the current files. We wound up bringing our on-site shredder to the house four or five times. This company has a shredder on their truck and you can watch your papers get pulverized right there on the street. It’s an activity I find oddly comforting. 

If you are in the position of keeping financial or tax records for your clients, you have a responsibility to protect this information. You are a steward of your client’s paperwork and, as such, you should stay on top of technology and find ways to handle their data and information with discretion and security.

The solution might be that you should not be keeping paper files on anyone. Or you keep just what you need and store them in locked cabinets. In this case, you should prepare a calendar of how long you will hold onto each client’s information, and you should have a clear policy for destroying your copies of their files after a stated period of time.

At the very least, you do not want to leave boxes of this sensitive information in your home to be dealt with haphazardly after you die. You should have a clear plan for them which has been expressly stated to your heirs. This will prevent them from suddenly finding themselves the caretaker of strangers’ sensitive information.

If you are keeping digital files with client information, you have the same responsibility – to protect the data you have. Please don’t think that because something is on your laptop it is safe from prying eyes. There are apps, services, and backup drives that you can use to manage data securely. And password managers are a hugely important tool. This article from the Wirecutter gives a great overview of some of the options available: Back up and secure your digital life.

It's a chore to keep on top of this data. But setting clear guidelines makes it a lot easier than finding yourself having to deal with it all at once. Or, worse, cleaning up a data breach.

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What to do with collections?

We are often asked to handle large collections of things. We have seen all kinds of collections – whimsical, spiritual, very expensive collections, and very modest ones. We have handled herds of decorative elephants, delicate teapots, campaign buttons, Coke bottles, freebies given away by airlines, you name it. 

We all know how this happens. You express your love for something to a few friends or relatives and, suddenly, you find that you are the recipient of those cute little collectibles for the rest of your life. Every birthday and gift-giving occasion is another chance for them to present you with yet another item in your ever-growing collection.

These collections can be fun for the collector, but they can, sadly, cause some issues for family and heirs. The vast number of items in each collection can be difficult and expensive to manage. Where once the collector looked around and admired each item in the collection as a unique entity with a story about how it was acquired, now the heir just sees a large amount of things that need to be handled, and the collection has an emotional hold on everyone because it represented the deceased so strongly.

We have worked with a number of clients who believe that because they have worked so long to create their collection, the collection must have some re-sale value. They seem to believe that the sheer number of items should make the whole lot more valuable. Sadly, this is rarely the case. Once in a while a tchotchke has re-sale value, if it was created by someone whose work is in demand, but in general these kinds of collections have very little re-sale value.

Years ago, we managed the estate of Lorraine, a woman who had amassed a tremendous collection of owls. Lorraine had ceramic owls, glass owls, paper owls, and stone owls. She had mugs, pillowcases, and t-shirts covered in owls. She had paintings of owls, stuffed owls, and owls stitched by needlepoint. 

Her executor was her niece, Janet, who lived in Florida. Janet was really stressed out about all these owls. She had no room for this huge collection and she knew they had no re-sale value. But she had loved Lorraine dearly and the owls had been really important to Lorraine.

Janet agonized over this. The collection almost seemed to hold a power over her. We identified a reputable charitable organization that would take them all as a donation, and we even found someone willing to try to sell them on Etsy for Janet, but neither idea felt right to her.

Finally, we came up with a solution. We decided that everyone in Lorraine’s life should have one owl. So Janet gave one to every member of the family and one to every friend and neighbor Lorraine had liked. She gave one to the super in Lorraine’s apartment building, another to her hair stylist, and even one to her dentist.

It took a lot of time and effort on Janet’s part, but it was worth it in the end. Each owl gift was another chance for Janet to share a memory of Lorraine with someone else who had loved her. None of these people would have wanted the whole parliament, but everyone was touched to receive one owl to remember Lorraine by.

If you have a large collection of things yourself, please keep in mind how your heirs will manage the collection. You may want to make a list of the items in the collection – or at least the key items – and designate them as gifts to be given to friends or family after you die.

Or you may want to consider giving them away to people now. You can offer that everyone who comes over can look over the collection and pick their favorite piece to take home with them. This is truly, always, the best way to give things away – one at a time, with each piece going to someone who appreciates it. And one of the great advantages to doing this while you are alive is that you can go visit your collections wherever they have wound up. Imagine sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at your cousin’s place and being served with your own owl napkin – which you gave to them to cherish on your behalf!

Photos and memorabilia

Before digital cameras, we used to take rolls and rolls of photos at a single event. Then we would have it all developed, often ordering duplicates (the photo shops all offered cheap deals to get doubles, after all). After the photos were developed, we would pick them up and rip open the envelope only to realize that… the lighting was bad that day… or we were using the wrong setting… or didn’t have it on autofocus.  And we’d end up with two sets of dark, blurry photos. But, more often than not, we kept them.

We at Paper Moon Moves are giving you permission to toss all of these in the trash. And I will tell you why. Every photo is not a memory. In fact, sometimes having too many photos of the same event muddles the memory. One perfect picture goes a lot further than ten mediocre ones. And, somewhere, deep in those piles of too-dark, out-of-focus photos is the one really great photo. If you keep all of them, you may never be able to find it.

But if you discard all the bad ones, and save the good one, then you can enjoy it. You can put it in a special album full of great photos that make you happy; you can have it digitized and share it electronically with anyone you like, anytime; or you can save it on your phone or computer and look at it daily.

A lot of people worry about throwing photos away. It feels wrong to do so, somehow. But what we always try to remind people is that, when it comes to photos, less is better.

Elsie

Elsie was a lovely woman with a fascinating family history. She came from a prominent New England family that included some early American political leaders and people you learned about in elementary school, including a president.

This provided her a great sense of pride, but it also presented a problem. Because of her family roots, Elsie felt like she had to hold onto everything related to her family. And she had a tremendous amount of family photos and memorabilia. She had so much, in fact, that she had to rent a two-bedroom apartment so that one entire room could store the boxes and boxes of photos. 

Elsie had us meet with her sister and a cousin, and we worked closely with Elsie’s sons. All four of them assured us that everything she was holding onto was a duplicate and that none of her photos and mementos were of any interest to any archives.

But Elsie never believed this. She always held out a fear that she would get rid of something that somebody, somewhere, would need in order to properly document the family history.

We moved her three times over the course of ten years and we emptied her final apartment after she died. So we got to know her quite well. With each move, we tried sorting with her to help her downsize some of the many photos and mementos, but she remained steadfast in holding onto it all.

In fact, she had us digitize a lot of photos – but she refused to discard the paper copies after spending money on digitizing services. And now, years later, all of this sits in a storage unit because her sons cannot bear to go against her wishes and dispose of any of it.

Denise

We helped Denise move to Boston to be near her kids and grandchildren. Like. Elsie, she also had boxes and boxes of photos. She had lost her husband when he was young. He had been a larger than life character, and there were a lot of family stories that revolved around him.

But Denise was much more realistic about her photos. She wanted to keep only a few – enough to fill one small album that she could keep handy and look at without hassle. She had us digitize a couple hundred photos – mostly photos of her kids and grandkids, and the family house that they all loved to visit on Shelter Island. She sent these photos to her kids so they could have fun looking through them.

The rest she tossed right into the trash. She could flip through twenty photos quickly and snatch only one or two to save or digitize. And I could see she was saving only really good photos. If there were fifteen shots from the same birthday party in 1985, she would quickly focus in on the one shot that told a good story.

So now, if Elsie’s kids want to see family photos, they have to look through many memory sticks and wade through all the photos she had digitized. Or visit the storage unit and start opening boxes. Just the thought of trying to sort through it all probably prevents them from even considering it.

Meanwhile, if Denise’s kids want to see family photos, they just pick up the album she keeps near her sofa, and within seconds they are happily seeing the memories that she wanted to preserve for them.

Sorting photos takes time, so you need to commit to the project. Put a two or three hour photo sorting appointment in your calendar. When the time comes, take out a portion of your collection – maybe one album or one small box of loose photos. Now search for good photos. Make it a hunting expedition. Tell yourself you only want to find the best ones. As you search, put just the photos that have meaning in one pile. This is your keep pile.

Put the rest into a big pile which we’ll call purgatory. The purgatory pile is the pile you plan to discard, but I recommend keeping it for another few days before you do so.

At the end of the session, make another appointment to sort again a few days later. At that point, take a quick look at the purgatory pile and then toss it in the trash (or shred the photos, if you are worried about neighbors coming across anything private). Then take out the next box of photos and repeat the whole process: look for the really good photos and save those; discard the rest. It’ll probably take some time but the process can be fun and even moving. Plus, you’ll be so happy when you have an organized photo collection. 

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Paperwork and files

Paper just accumulates. I can’t explain it. A lot of it comes into our homes every day in the mail and if we don’t have a system for handling it, it can quickly start to pile up. Suddenly a few pieces of mail have become fifty pieces of mail, then more.

Most of it is not important, but we have to sort through it all to find the things that are. This takes time, of course, and it tends to take a backseat to all the chores that hit us when we get home from work -- getting dinner together, walking the dog, maybe a quick trip to get groceries.

Many of our clients have had massive amounts of paper to deal with. We see a lot of junk mail, which is pretty easy to throw away, but we also see a lot of papers with sensitive information that needs to be shredded. The real issue is that there is usually, deep inside each file cabinet or each pile of paper, something with information that needs to be kept. This means somebody (often our staff) has to sort through all the files and papers to uncover the things that are needed. Then the rest can be shredded or discarded.

Maria

Maria’s brother, Jack, hired us to move her from her Brooklyn apartment to a residence near him in Maryland. The apartment was the same one they had grown up in. Jack left home to join the army when he was a young man, but Maria stayed and lived with her parents until both of them died many years later.

She was a solitary person. She had friends from church, but none of them were close enough to have been invited to her home. When we started working with her, she told us that nobody else had been inside – other than the building super – in twenty years.

She had kept people out because she was embarrassed for anyone to see how much paper she had accumulated. It started with her parents, eighty years earlier.  Her father was evidently a “pack rat” and neither he nor her mother ever managed to come up with a good system for disposing papers they didn’t need. They just kept it all and boxed it up over the years. Maria inherited these papers and well as these habits and eventually the second and third bedrooms became nothing more than storage for papers and files.

Maria was paralyzed by it all and, to be honest, I felt a little paralyzed when I first saw it. It felt like it would not be possible to sort it all, even if we worked for months.

But Sarah on our staff was able to get into a groove with Maria. When Sarah is not assisting our clients she is a yoga instructor. This gives her a calm, soothing presence. By giving Maria time to get used to her and trust her not to throw anything away carelessly, she managed to convince Maria to agree that some papers could be discarded. They made a list together. It started with things like “expired coupons, magazines from more than two years ago, and old grocery lists.” As they worked, Sarah would add to the list (all with Maria’s approval), until finally Sarah was able to throw away roughly ninety percent of the papers she found.  

The longer the list became, the quicker the work progressed. Eventually they worked themselves down to papers that had belonged to Maria’s parents. She had always felt it was disrespectful to toss any of their papers, but Sarah patiently showed her how much of their papers were things exactly like those on Maria’s discard list. Slowly, Maria allowed herself to part with these papers as well.

The best news was that they were able to find a bunch of papers Maria needed. By the end, they had a box of financial documents that Maria would need in her new apartment, and a box with tax records from recent years. They also had more than a few boxes of family memorabilia. It was a little more than we wanted her to keep, but a lot less than she would have kept if we hadn’t sorted so diligently with her.

If you have a lot of papers collected, you are probably beating yourself up for not tackling it. The truth is that sorting papers and files is excruciatingly boring. Don’t be hard on yourself if you’ve let it go. But please keep in mind that if you don’t handle it now, you may find that someone else has to do this chore for you one day.

Start by preparing a list of things you need to keep: tax records going back seven years, documents related to your property if you own it, records of stock purchases, etc. Everyone’s situation is unique, so you should consult with an accountant or financial adviser as you prepare this list.

With this list in hand, commit to sorting your files in 2-3 hour increments and stay focused on the task during that time. Keep anything on your list but try to be committed to discarding the rest.

You should shred anything that includes sensitive information like your social security number, bank account numbers, or health records. There are services that will shred on-site and do not cost that much, relatively. This will give you the freedom to shred a lot at one time.

And if you’re feeling discouraged, remember Maria. It took time and patience, but she managed to turn that

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