How to redact a tax file number from a payslip or bank statement, properly

Payslips, tax returns and bank statements carry a tax file number, and a lot of the people you hand them to are not allowed to keep it. Lenders and aggregators ask brokers to remove TFNs from supporting documents. Real estate agents get sent payslips with the number still on them every day. And most of the “redactions” people do leave the number sitting underneath a black box. Here is what proper redaction means and how to do it.

Why the TFN has to go

Australia’s Privacy (Tax File Number) Rule restricts who may collect and keep tax file numbers, which is why the organisations you send documents to would rather not receive them at all. Lenders and aggregators ask for them to be removed from payslips, statements and notices of assessment before a file is submitted, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner says you are entitled to remove your own TFN from a document before you hand it over. The income figures stay; the number goes.

What does not work

• A black rectangle drawn in a PDF viewer or in Word. The shape sits on top of the text. The number is still in the file, and anyone can select it, search for it, or delete the box.
• A highlighter set to black. Same problem: it is an annotation over the text, not a change to it.
• Changing the text colour to match the background. Invisible on screen, fully present in the file.
• Cropping a screenshot. It removes the number, along with the document’s text layer, its metadata and any sign that it was a real payslip. Some recipients will not accept it.

What proper redaction means

A proper redaction deletes the text and the image data under the box when the file is saved, then draws the box. After that there is nothing to select, nothing to search and nothing to recover, because it is not in the file any more. Two things follow from this. First, the removal happens on save, so a marked-up document is not redacted until you save it. Second, a scanned document has no text to delete until it has been made searchable, because a scan is a picture: the tool has to read the page before it can find a number on it.

How to do it in FirstAboard PDF

1. Open the document and choose Redact.
2. Use Find and black out and pick Tax file number. Every instance in the document is marked. The same finder knows Australian ABNs, ACNs, BSBs, Medicare numbers, passport numbers, card numbers, phone numbers and email addresses, or you can type a word, such as a name.
3. Check the marks. Where a number has its own check digit, such as a tax file number or an ABN, the finder verifies it, so a phone number that happens to look similar is not blacked out by mistake. Drag a box over anything else you want gone.
4. Save. That is when the removal happens: saving deletes the text underneath, it does not cover it up. Turn on Sanitise on save as well to strip hidden metadata, comments and links from the file.

For a scanned payslip, run Make Searchable first. It reads the scan on your computer and adds a text layer to the original page, so the finder can see the number. Everything above runs on your own computer, and the document is not uploaded for any of it.

Before you send it

Search the saved file for the number. If the search finds nothing, the redaction held. If it finds the number, you drew a box over it rather than removing it, and it is time to do it properly.