Paperless Offices in Seattle

Federal Laws that Encourage Electronic Document Storage

• In  2002, the federal government introduced the introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which requires businesses to properly maintain financial records. That includes being able to retrieve them when required. This is significantly easier when the documents are stored electronically. 
  
• In 2003, Congress passed the Fair and Accurate Credit Reporting Act (FACTA) which also requires business to properly safeguard and store personal information of employees and customers and properly destroy it.  Obviously, if documents are systematically converted to a digital format, it is easier to store, retrieve, and ultimately destroy this sensitive information. 
  
• The third major act which compels companies to store information electronically is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 which addresses the security and privacy of health data. The standards are meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation’s health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data in the US health care system.

Most Seattle offices operate under a flood of paper documents. Employees maintain a personal archive, each office maintains another archive, and then there is also an official company archive. The storage required for paper documents grows at a rate of 20-25% every year. To help meet their storage needs many companies look to off-site storage companies to store their company documents. This solves the storage problem but can be very costly depending on the size of the business.

Consider just one 80 gigabyte hard drive. It can hold 2.7 million documents and costs only $120. The same storage for paper documents would be 68 four-drawer file cabinets. The cost for one cabinet alone is more than $120.