Frequently, to be in compliance with the Public Records Act, municipalities and police departments must make records available that contain private or confidential information such as social security numbers, names, employee ID numbers, or bank account numbers. Normally, this means that a staff member has to manually redaction this information which can be tedious, easily prone to errors, and take numerous staff hours–even using Laserfiche.
CPS has developed an auto-redaction tool that allows staff to systematically redact private or confidential information upon capture or post-capture into the Laserfiche system. We’ll start by opening the Laserfiche client. For instance, a public records request has been made for five years worth of bank statements. This PRR will result in the production of thousands of documents. Obviously, bank statements contain confidential data such as account numbers, so those will all need to be redacted. This request will take countless hours to deliver.
CPS built this redaction tool for this particular scenario. However, the really cool feature is that you can add additional items to be redacted like words. So right here in the template in the redact section, I’m adding fields that will allow me to redact words like ‘tax’ and ‘access’ and ‘disbursements.’ I’ll save changes and close the document. By the way, this feature is completely customizable. On the back end, Workflow kicks in and redacts the items in the redaction fields. A fully redacted copy has been made and posted on the public portal. Remember this document is both a permanent, vital record and a public record. Simultaneously, an email is sent to me that documents the redactions and the number of occurrences of each redaction. For example, here’s the word ‘tax’, and it’s been redacted 30 times. ‘Account numbers’ have been redacted 41 times and so on. And you can see the rest of the redacted values and the number of redactions. In addition, this email also contains the link to the public version of the document, that I mentioned previously, which has already been posted. As you can see all the keywords and the account
numbers have been redacted.
Essentially, what we have done is built intelligent redacting capabilities within the Laserfiche Workflow. This auto-redaction tool a really useful, time-saving feature and no other Laserfiche Partner does this.
If you are interested in learning more about our customizations check out our services page on our website CPS247.com.
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