Is your organization triggering identity theft?

By Nicole Gantz, Certified Identity Theft Risk Management Specialist, Honkamp Krueger & Co., P.C. Contact Nicole at (563) 556-0123 or ngantz@honkamp.com.

When you think of identity theft, do you immediately think of hackers in another country trying to access your personal information, credit card numbers, passwords, etc? Most people do. In actuality, more than 218,000,000 records have been compromised due to data security breaches by American businesses, organizations and government entities since 2005 (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, February, 2007). These lost records have the potential to lead to identity theft because they contain sensitive information about consumers such as social security number, credit card number and more.

So what is your business or organization currently doing to prevent a data security breach of your customer or employee records? Ask yourself:

• What am I sending through the mail? Is a more secure method available?

• What am I throwing in the garbage or recycling bin? Are we shredding as often as we should?

• Am I properly safeguarding the sensitive information that I am in charge of?

• Is my computer password strong? Am I aware of the latest phishing scams so that I do not open my computer up to hackers?

• Does my organization have a policy on protecting sensitive customer and employee information?

• Have our employees ever been informed about the importance of safe-guarding sensitive customer information?

• What would our customers say if we lost their sensitive information? Would they stay with us or go to our competitor?

If you are like most businesses, you have room to improve the security of your sensitive information. Consider the following:

• Educate your employees about personal identity theft so that they can relate the situation to their personal lives.

• Establish a policy that outlines exactly how your business or organization secures customer information, both hard copy and electronically.

• Assign someone to be in charge of this policy and train your employees on this policy

In my experience, when a business implements these suggestions, employees become little “foot soldiers” for preventing identity theft, both professionally and personally. Following these suggestions gives your business some control over the seemingly uncontrollable problem of identity theft.