Eigh­teen months since news of the co­los­sal data breach at Equi­fax broke, the com­pany re­spon­si­ble for one of the coun­try’s larg­est, and likely the most dam­ag­ing, losses of per­sonal in­for­ma­tion has yet to face mon­e­tary pen­al­ties. At the same time, very lit­tle has been done in the way of re­form.

That could soon change.

Ac­cord­ing to Equi­fax’s an­nual re­port filed re­cently with the U.S. Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion, two fed­eral agen­cies are poised to take ac­tion.

The Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion and the Con­sumer Finan­cial Pro­tec­tion Bureau “in­tend to seek in­junc­tive re­lief dam­ages and, with re­spect to the CFPB, civil money pen­al­ties against us based on al­le­ga­tions re­lated to the 2017 cy­ber­se­cu­rity in­ci­dent,” At­lanta-based Equi­fax said in the fil­ing.

For many, such moves are over­due.

“One and a half years later, Equi­fax has still not paid a price for put­ting nearly 150 mil­lion Amer­i­cans at risk of iden­tity theft and other types of fraud for the rest of their lives,” said Mike Litt, con­sumer cam­paigns di­rec­tor for the Pub­lic In­ter­est Re­search Group known as U.S. PIRG.

He con­sid­ers the breach the worst in his­tory be­cause of the amount and type of sen­si­tive data ex­posed, in­clud­ing So­cial Se­cu­rity num­bers, birth­dates, ad­dresses and driver’s li­cense num­bers.

“So­cial Se­cu­rity num­bers are re­ally the keys to iden­tity theft and other types of fraud,” he said.

Mr. Litt said the big­gest way to pre­vent fu­ture large-scale breaches is to cre­ate the spec­ter of large, loom­ing fines.

Com­pa­nies need to know, “if they fail to pro­tect our per­sonal in­for­ma­tion, there will be stiff pen­al­ties,” he said. “We re­ally need an act of Con­gress to en­sure that.”

The breach at Equi­fax was con­sid­ered es­pe­cially egre­gious in part be­cause it and other credit re­port­ing agen­cies col­lect per­sonal in­for­ma­tion on con­sum­ers with­out their con­sent, and with­out

If you close your eyes, it sounds like a glass vase is be­ing thrown onto pave­ment. Then bro­ken shards seemed to be dragged across the ground, tum­bling and clinking against one an­other like beads on an in­dus­trial-sized neck­lace. It’s loud.

That’s the sound of the shred­der chew­ing up hard drives teem­ing with data.

De­stroy­ing hard­ware is big busi­ness for Cy­berCrunch, a Greens­burg-based com­pany that an­nu­ally pro­cesses 4 mil­lion pounds of elec­tronic refuse, com­monly called “e-waste.”

As busi­nesses reg­u­larly ex­change old com­put­ers, print­ers and phones for new ones, click­ing and drag­ging sen­si­tive files to that re­cy­cling bin on your com­puter’s desk­top screen is not enough — it doesn’t per­ma­nently de­lete data.

In­stead, firms rely on data de­struc­tion ser­vices from com­pa­nies like Cy­berCrunch to en­sure they don’t leave the back door open to data breaches or put them­selves at risk for com­pli­ance fines.

“It’s like buy­ing an in­sur­ance pol-

icy,” said Bora Ca­lis­kan, for­mer busi­ness de­vel­op­ment man­ager for Cy­berCrunch. “They know they can show they de­stroyed the hard drives, they have proof of it.”

Pri­vacy is im­por­tant, but there are also en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns.

Ac­cord­ing to re­search from the United Na­tions, about 50 mil­lion tons of e-waste was pro­duced glob­ally in 2012 alone — about 15 pounds per per­son, on av­er­age. The U.S. was re­spon­si­ble for about

20 per­cent of that.

E-waste man­age­ment is ex­pected to be­come a $49.4 bil­lion in­dus­try by 2020, ac­cord­ing to Al­lied Mar­ket Re­search, a Port­land, Ore.-based mar­ket re­search com­pany.

Don’t try this at home

Water, mag­nets, hy­dro­chlo­ric acid and, yes, even the mi­cro­wave, all turn up in an on­line search for

The new tax laws have had a lot of in­ter­est­ing con­se­quences, one of which was that a new class of peo­ple are good can­di­dates to con­vert their tra­di­tional re­tire­ment ac­counts into Roth ac­counts.

The trick is whether in­ves­tors think tax rates are lower to­day than they will be down the road.

James Lange, a Roth fan and au­thor of a book on the sub­ject, thinks it’s a no-brainer for a lot of folks since the in­di­vid­ual tax cuts pro­vided by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ex­pire at the end of 2025. So rates could be headed back up in a few years.

“The tax rates are much lower now than ever be­fore,” Mr. Lange said. “So, if you take my prem­ise that the best time to do a Roth IRA con­ver­sion is when your tax rate is the low­est it will ever be, right now might be a great time to con­vert.”

Others aren’t sure that such a move would ben­e­fit ev­ery­one. Older in­di­vid­u­als, for in­stance, may not have enough life ex­pec­tancy left to break even if they were to pay all their taxes up­front in a Roth con­ver­sion. But there

seems to be agree­ment that it’s some­thing in­ves­tors should con­sider.

The most at­trac­tive fea­ture of a Roth IRA is that all with­draw­als from the ac­count are tax-free, though you do not re­ceive an in­come tax de­duc­tion on con­tri­bu­tions.

Con­tri­bu­tions to tra­di­tional IRAs or re­tire­ment plans, on the other hand, typ­i­cally are de­ducted from in­come taxes and are