Patent ID: 7973980

Claim:
A document discarding system comprising: a document discarding device that discards a document; an image reading device that is used by a client requesting to discard the document; and a document managing device that communicates with the document discarding device and the image reading device, the document managing device comprising: an information managing unit that stores and manages the identifying information and the status information of the document in association with each other, and updates the status information in accordance with discarding request information from the image reading device or discarding process information from the document discarding device; and an affirmation and negation deciding unit that decides whether or not the document can be discarded on the basis of the status information of the document in a case where the document discarding device inquires about the discard of the document to send a decided result as a reply to the document discarding device, the image reading device comprising: a request informing unit that extracts the identifying information of the document from the document related to a discarding request to transmit information including the identifying information to the document managing device as the discarding request information, and a hard-to-read processing unit that makes the document related to the discarding request difficult to read, and the document discarding device comprising: an information extracting unit that extracts the identifying information of the document from the document to be discarded; a discard recognizing unit that inquires the document managing device about whether or not the document of the identifying information extracted by the information extracting unit is discarded; a discarding process unit that carries out a discarding process of the document to be discarded in a case where a replying result from the document managing device shows that a discarding process is affirmative; and a completion informing unit that transmits information that the discarding process is completed in the discarding process unit to the document managing device as the discarding process information in a case where the discarding process is completed in the discarding process unit.