Paper Shredder Tracing

With the increased scrutiny on corporate fraud, the need to reconstruct and trace the documents from office and home paper shredders has become a new area of study.  The federal government has in the last few years recruited more and more forensic accountants, who have been charged with uncovering corporate theft and fraud.  Undoubtedly, one of the problems that these investigators face is the use of paper shredders to hide evidence.

One interesting study, as reported in a chapter of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, involves the ability to trace the source of a document after it has been shredded.  In the experiment detailed by Jack Brassil as performed by HP Laboratories, if two shredders were each fed a piece of paper, the shredded pieces should upon visual inspection appear to be similar in both instances.  If one of the machines is altered to produce shredded pieces of a slightly different size, the question is asked whether the pieces from the different shredders are distinguishable.   The test shows that by slightly modifying one of the paper shredders, the pieces can be used to identify exactly which shredder produced the shreds. 

The benefits of the of this research have great promise in the fields of forensic accounting as well as FBI investigations.  Other questions that are posed are whether shredding remnants can be used to identify a paper shredder absent any changes to the shredder