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How to Secure Your Paper & Digital Tax Information TAXES! It’s my favourite time of year!! Come on, you know you love doing your taxes as much as I do! (note the sarcasm).

Ok, let’s get down to it. Taxes are not fun. But you can make your life easier - and safer - with a few tax tips. Our friends at PC Mag offer some excellent tips on how to organize all your tax documents and how to use your old tax forms to simplify your tax process.

Moving past the actual acts of preparing and filing your taxes, you also need to take stock of your SECURITY. All that information that you input into your taxes - paper or digital - and the tax files themselves contain enough information for identity theft and fraud.

How to Secure Your Tax Information

Protecting your data is our goal here at Absolute LoJack, so Absolute's Mark Grace spoke with both PC Mag and Biz Report to offer some tips on securing your personal information. We’ll summarize some of our top tips and insights here, as well as some of those featured on PC Mag & Biz Report.

Paper Information

• Shred your sensitive paper documents on a regular basis throughout the year. If you digitize important documents, you can shred your original documents.

• Shred old tax documents - don’t just throw them out • Keep your tax papers in a secure location (particularly past tax filings or

important tax documents for an upcoming year) • Don’t carry your Social Security Number with you

Digital Information

• Use a strong password for digital tax filing • Keep a secure back-up in the cloud or on an external drive. Each has its own

risks, but back-ups are important. • Purge documents on your smartphone or computer (did you take a photo of

anything?) • Know how to spot tax scams • Don’t send tax documents by email – to your spouse, accountant, or anyone.

Mail it instead! • If you have to share some personal information by email, consider password

protecting it, encrypting it or sharing it using a secure cloud service. It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than nothing.

©2013 Absolute Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

• Make sure the software you use – or your accountant uses – is following government regulations for security.

• Be cautious in sharing your Social Security Number • Update your OS and security software to ensure you have all the latest security

updates • Install Absolute LoJack to lock / wipe data from your laptop, smartphone or tablet

The problem with digitizing sensitive information is that it ends up residing in places you’re likely to forget. Did you snap a photo of your W2 form then upload it to Evernote to make it text-searchable? Super convenient for tax-time, but did you delete that photo from your phone? And how about all the documents you scanned and saved to your computer to prepare your taxes? Even if you’ve put that data in the cloud, most people still like having it reside on their home computers.

So, in comes the need for data security and Absolute LoJack. If that smartphone, tablet or laptop goes missing, you don’t want to have to worry about data theft or identity theft or tax fraud. Yuck! Protect that data with Absolute LoJack, giving you the option to lock your device and wipe it clean, protecting you from unwanted access by unauthorized users.

About the Author

Arieanna Schweber has been a part of the Absolute Software writing team since 2007. Arieanna was Canada's first female professional blogger and has been professionally blogging since 2006, speaking at leading blogging conferences including BlogHer and Northern Voice. Arieanna has a joint degree in Business and Communications from Simon Fraser University and continues to build communities for Vancouver-based clients.

About the Company Absolute Software(@Absolutecorp) helps businesses and consumers track, manage, secure and recover mobile computers and devices using our patented persistence technology. We license the name "LoJack" from the LoJack Corporation to highlight the similarities between our consumer product, LoJack for Laptops (@LoJackforLaptop), and their stolen vehicle recovery service. Currently Absolute Software has recovered over 30,000 devices in over 100 countries around the world.