Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

information management

I’m cleaning out my file drawers / boxes right now. For the moment, I’m concentrating on my financial records, having decided that my pay stubs from, say, 1997, are really of no use to me. This process, however, has surfaced a new pet peeve for me: Just about every employer to date has printed my social security number on my pay stub — and sometimes my bank account and routing number, too! I’m certainly not comfortable throwing all these papers out in the trash as-is, and redacting the offending info page-by-page with a Sharpie won’t do the trick, either. So I’m stuck shredding them, six pages at a time, and likely irritating my neighbors to no end in the process.

Is there really any overriding reason for company payroll departments to print that information on my pay stub? It’s not like I need it: I already know my social security number, and my bank account and routing numbers aren’t really things I need to be reminded of on a bi-weekly basis. And it’s not like the payroll department gets any benefit out of printing that information, either; pay stubs are for distributing paychecks / direct deposit notices and providing a record of the transaction for the employee. If they needed that sensitive information for anything, they have it on record in the computer system.

My pay stub really only needs to tell me three things:

• How much I got paid
• How much got taken out, and for what
• How much vacation and sick time I have

That’s it.

And now back to our regularly scheduled paper shredding…