[GreenKeys] Why destruction?

[Alan Bain]

Don Robert House wrote:
>It has to do with accounting and taxes.  In the last 36 years I have 
>seen this happen several times.  The equipment is fully depreciated 
>and all of its original value has been written off.  IF the equipment 
>is sold or donated it gains value.  Value that would cancel the 
>depreciation and cause the tax accountants all kinds of problems.
>
While this is certainly the usual reason for not donating equipment
in a formal sense (and these days those who donate equipment have
to be increasingly careful about littigation), the desire to ensure
the rule is adhered to and no scavenging allowed is unusual outside
of a military environment.  There are many other rules which quietly
get ignored, and enforcing this so strictly is akin to employing
someone to sit in every company photocopy room to make sure
no personal copies are made on the office machines.  Usuallly there's
more than this, and with teleprinter equipment like all data storage
gear there is the issue of confidentially of stored data (say paper
tape), and the cost of someone to check all 'released' equipment to
make sure that the 'equipment' taken is just equipment with
no data conatined -- and it's just not worth the risk of littigation
should this check not be made.  I've seen this one over and over 
again; even with later gear.

To cite an amusing example of this, I once rescued some old minicomputer
equipment from a company where I was working with full permission of
the various line managers, but there was a company rule that no scrapped
equipment could include any kind of magnetic storage media.  Removing the
winchesters from the minicomputer would have left a pile of junk, so we
invoked another company rule, that I did not have a screwdriver user's
permit and thus could not remove the hard disk without infringing the
heath and safety rule (which was the most dumb rule I have ever seen).
To be fair this was only possible because they knew that I was an employee
and thus already bound to their non disclosure agreements.

Alan
M5AIQ/AE6AQ