The National Football League Players Association spent more than $12,000 on document shredding last fiscal year, according to recent federal disclosures.

The NFLPA is required to make annual financial filings with the U.S. Department of Labor and on May 28 turned in its report for the period covering March 1, 2007, to Feb. 29, 2008.

It showed that the players' union paid $12,461 for document shredding to Office Shredders, an Elkridge, Md., company.

Last year the NFLPA moved its Washington offices four-tenths of a mile, from 2021 L Street NW to 1133 20th Street NW. According to industry experts, it is not unusual for a company to purge documents as part of a move.

The union also was -- and is -- under intense scrutiny for its treatment of retired players, especially those with financial problems and physical disabilities.

The U.S. Senate and House of Representative held hearings last year about the plight of retired players amid their claims that the NFL's disability system is corrupt. Congressional oversight of the issue is ongoing and legislation is being considered.

The NFLPA and its for-profit subsidiary, Players Inc., also is the subject of a legal battle with a group of retired players led by Bernie Parrish, formerly of the Cleveland Browns. A lawsuit filed by Parrish and others sought extensive document discovery from the union.

NFLPA executive Gene Upshaw reacted sharply to The Charlotte Observer's e-mailed questions about the document shredding.

"Your knowingly malicious attempt to link the routine practice of protecting the confidentiality of financial and other proprietary business records (a practice that every prudent business follows) with ongoing litigation and Congressional oversight hearings is libelous," Upshaw wrote in an e-mail Friday afternoon.

About an hour after receiving his response, the Observer asked Upshaw via e-mail if the NFLPA kept a record of what documents were shredded and, if so, if the union would provide a copy of the record to the newspaper.

Upshaw did not respond to that e-mail, or to e-mail and voice mail messages left Saturday and Monday at his office.

The owner of Office Shredders, John Kane of Potomac, Md., declined to speak to the Observer and, through an office assistant, referred all questions to the NFLPA.

Office Shredders is a division of a company, also owned by Kane, that was paid $59,897 by the NFLPA for relocation services last year, according to the federal filing.

Representatives from two document shredding companies, one in Charlotte and the other in Washington, told the Observer that pricing methods for paper destruction vary, but a commonly used rate for large jobs is 10 cents per pound.

At that rate, the amount paid by the NFLPA to Office Shredders would equal 124,610 pounds, more than 62 tons.

The Observer calculated how much that would be if all the paper were standard 8 1/2-by-11-inch copy paper and discovered the stack would have been 4.8 times the height of the Bank of America tower, Charlotte's tallest building at 875 feet.

David Wright, owner and general manager of Proshred in Charlotte, said most shredding companies have two or three jobs a year the size of the one done for the NFLPA.

"In our experience, it tends to be a company that has no ongoing purging calendar for their record retention process," Wright said.

The union's annual reports for fiscal 2006 and 2007, filed after the Labor Department began requiring unions to make detailed accounting of receipts and disbursements, did not list any expenses for paper shredding.

Next page >

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.