Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

18–7. Filing Policies for Best Practices (Chapter 10)

• The company shall identify the legally mandated period during which various types of documents must be retained, and destroy the documents thereafter if no longer required for operational purposes. This policy is useful from a legal perspective, in that a company can destroy documents as soon as legally mandated durations are exceeded. This reduces the risk that documents will be found during the discovery process of a trial, which could be deleterious to the company. From the controller’s perspective, this policy is also an excellent way to reduce the clutter caused by excessive paper storage.

  Impacted best practices:

  • Adopt a document-destruction policy