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Medical Services – IRS Safeguards Appendix Page 3 of 5 OFFICE SECURITY AND RECORD RETENTION All TEA, Food Stamp, and Medicaid case records will be kept in a locked storage area during non-working hours. Further, at no time will any IRS or BENDEX Wage report be left in open view so that unauthorized persons may gain access. IRS reports are generated under the title "State Resource" reports. All IRS and BENDEX Wage summary reports will be maintained in the county office for one year from the report rundate and may be destroyed at that time following the procedures which follow. DESTRUCTION OF IRS TAX RETURN INFORMATION The Tax Reform Act of 1976 requires that certain actions be taken when destroying federal tax information in order to protect its confidentiality. IRS data will be destroyed by burning or shredding. Burning: The material is to be either burned in an incinerator that produces enough heat to burn the entire bundle or the bundle should be separated to insure that all pages are consumed. Shredding: To make reconstruction more difficult, the paper should be inserted so that the lines of print are perpendicular to the cutting line; small amounts of shredded paper should not be allowed to accumulate in the shredder bin. IRS data in identifiable form must never be released to private contractors for unsupervised destruction. Destruction of the data must be witnessed by an agency employee in a manner sufficient to safeguard the data from unauthorized disclosure. Each Economic Services Supervisor will have the responsibility of maintaining a Control Log of all IRS data that is destroyed. At a minimum, the log will contain the following:  Date of destruction  Method of destruction  Printout number and rundate for summary reports  Case name and number for cases containing IRS data  Agency personnel responsible for overseeing destruction Since IRS data must be logged when destroyed and since Individual Case Sheets will be filed in case records, it is necessary that case records be screened for IRS data prior to destruction. If