Records and Data Clean Up Day, October 24

As part of this year’s Cyber Safety Campaign, a companywide Records and Data Clean Up Day will be held on Tuesday, October 24. Please plan to take an hour from your day to review the hard copy and electronic documents that you have saved in your office or on your computer. If they are not needed for our business operations and if they aren’t required to be retained for legal purposes, they should be shredded or deleted.

Why are we doing this? Hanging on to documents that exceed our legal or business retention requirements could potentially put our business, employees and customers at risk. Not only is it costly to store unnecessary documents and files, but it creates more information that could be accessed by bad actors. Employees should be aware of any documents in their possession that contain sensitive information, such as employee or customer personal information, or that are official Records, and should destroy or delete them when they are no longer needed.

If you are preparing to permanently delete or shred documents, please reference the guidelines here.

Important Definitions

Records are both electronic and physical documents generated or received by Republic that are governed by the Records Retention Schedule (RRS). These official Records have an associated legal or business retention period which is outlined in the Records Retention Schedule. The sole copy of an official Record should not be destroyed unless first cleared by Republic’s Records and Information Management (RIM) team.

Business Value Information are materials or documents not considered a Record and will not have an associated retention requirement. This type of document serves a specific, temporary purpose and should be disposed of once it is no longer useful or needed for legal hold purposes. These are likely documents such as meeting notes, presentations, trade publications, or copies of official Records.