The SEC has announced the successor to the EDGAR system. EDGAR is a 1980's system designed to hold electronic copies of all the forms submitted to the SEC by public companies. After 20 years the system is now showing its age and needed an upgrade.

The new system is call IDEA, Interactive Data Electronic Applications. The new system should make finding and retrieving financial data easier for investors.

Here is the video of the release press conference.

The school board of the Lee County School District are debating whether it makes more sense to shred expired documents or store them. The thinking is that they can simply stack the boxes in warehouses the district currently owns and then save the cost of shredding.

What they fail to understand is that they will still be required to shred them but the cost of a shredding service will only go up. And they will also have added the risk of storing records that are no longer needed.

The Identity Theft Resource Center has a running list of organizations who have data breaches. The first half of 2008 saw 342 data breaches for a rise of 69% over last year. The question is whether this is a result of more strict disclosure laws or worse security.

The breakdown of breaches for this year are 36.8% general business, 21.3% education, 17.0% governments, 14.9% health card and 10% financial institutions.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued new regulations to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) known as the Red Flags Rules. The new rules require financial institutions to create prevention programs to detect and respond to "patterns, practices, or specific activities that could indicate identity theft." The program must be in place by November, 1 2008.

According to the rule a financial institution is defined as banks, savings and loan associations, credit unions, and creditors. Creditors does not include every business that accepts credit cards but does include any business that extends credit. For example, finance companies, automobile dealers, mortgage brokers, utility companies, and telecommunications companies.

Some red flags that covered entities must be monitoring are:

• Alerts, notifications, or warnings from a consumer reporting agency
• Suspicious documents
• Suspicious information
  
• Unusual use of a covered account
• Notices from customers, law enforcement authorities, or other businesses

This represents the biggest changes to the FACTA law since it was enacted in 2003

We recently wrote of the acquisition of DocuVault in Denver by Iron Mountain. DocuVault of Delaware Valley has announced that they will be spun from the DocuVault Group, that was purchases by Iron Mountain, into their own company

Iron Mountain has announced Bob Brennan is their new CEO. Brennan replaces Richard Reese who held the position of CEO for the last 27 years. Reese is now executive chairman of the board.

It will be interesting to see how the Records Storage giant changes under new leadership after such a long reign by Reese.

Last November, Susan Leukam suffered fatal injuries when a motorized shelving system accidentally activated and trapped her between shelves. Susan worked in the medical records center for Rice Memorial Hospital.

The hospital has been fined $50,000 by OSHA for safety violations.

This is the first such incident I have ever run across of automated shelves causing serious injuries. If you have heard about others I would love to hear from you in the comments.