Q:  Here’s an unusual situation:

A retail store goes out of business and the building remains vacant for almost three years. When it is finally sold, the new owners (me) “inherited” unlocked file cabinets that contained employee records, including Social Security numbers and other personal tax and employment information. So, my questions are:

• As a new owner, do I have a legal obligation to advertise or attempt to locate the employees and notify them of the existence of the records?
• Do the employees have a right to retrieve the records?
• Should I simply destroy the files and forget about them?
  

A:  Well, I just never know what’s going to show up in my inbox.

Generally, employee records –whether digital or the hard copies you describe– are considered company property and as such they belong to the employer. Of course, employers also have a legal obligation to safeguard that property since it contains personal data. As a rule, personally identifiable information is afforded special protection by data privacy laws, since it could cause great harm to the employee through identity theft and other fraud if it gets in the wrong hands.  Apparently, the previous owners failed to fulfill their obligation by not disposing of the documents when they closed the business.

As a new owner of this “property” you have no legal obligation to try to contact these individuals, and as former employees they don’t have a specific right to retrieve them.  After all, when they left the previous owner’s employment, they had no expectation of seeing those records again, and walked away assuming (wrongly) their information was safe.

So, can you destroy the files and forget it?  Yes, you can. And that’s my recommendation.  Make sure you dispose of them in a manner befitting confidential information, i.e., shred them or hire a record-destroy type service.

Lastly, it’s not within your power (or responsibility) to determine whether this information was compromised before you found it.  If it was, the harm is already done and there’s nothing to be gained by informing individuals.

All you can do now is to dispose of them responsibly and prevent future harm. You get kudos for taking this seriously.

Not intended as legal advice. ©Copyright Eva Del Rio