BASALT · JOURNAL
Redacting insurance claim files
A claim file is one of the most mixed document sets in ordinary business: medical records, repair invoices, police reports, witness statements, photographs and internal assessments, all in one bundle.
Different recipients are entitled to different parts of it, which is the whole difficulty.
Who gets what
The insured, the claimant, a third party insurer, a loss adjuster, external counsel and a regulator all have different entitlements. A single fully redacted version rarely satisfies all of them, and producing one version for everyone usually means over redacting for some and under redacting for others.
Decide the recipient before the marking, not after.
What usually comes out
Third party personal data appearing incidentally, such as other people in a police report or bystanders in photographs.
Medical detail beyond what is relevant to the claim, which is frequently included wholesale because it arrived that way.
Internal reserve figures and assessment notes, which are commonly not disclosable and are commonly left in.
Bank details on payment records.
Photographs
Images in claim files are a recurring failure. A photograph of a damaged vehicle includes a registration plate, sometimes a face in a window, and often a house number.
Redacting an image means destroying pixels and re-encoding, not drawing a box on top. A box drawn over a number plate in an annotation layer is removed with one click by the recipient.
Internal assessments
The most damaging disclosures from claim files are usually internal notes rather than claimant data: a candid view of liability, or a reserve figure that reveals the insurer's position.
These are often in comments or tracked changes carried over from a word processor, or in metadata rather than on the page.
The check
Extract the text and search for the terms you removed, including reserve figures. Read metadata. List attachments. Then look at every image in the output at full size, because image redaction failures are invisible in a text extraction.
This is a description of common practice rather than legal advice. Obligations vary by jurisdiction and by the terms you are working under, and the authority that governs your work is the one to check with.
Frequently asked questions
What should be redacted from an insurance claim file?
Third party personal data appearing incidentally, medical detail beyond what is relevant to the claim, internal reserve figures and assessment notes, and bank details on payment records. What comes out depends on which recipient the version is for.
How do I redact photographs in a claim file?
The pixels must be destroyed and the image re-encoded. A black box drawn as an annotation over a registration plate or face is removed with a single click by the recipient, because the original image is untouched underneath.
What is most often wrongly disclosed from claim files?
Internal material rather than claimant data: candid liability assessments and reserve figures, frequently surviving in comments, tracked changes or metadata rather than on the visible page.
Should one redacted version go to every recipient?
Rarely. The insured, a third party insurer, a loss adjuster, counsel and a regulator have different entitlements, so a single version usually over redacts for some and under redacts for others. Decide the recipient before marking.
Doing it in Basalt
Basalt is a native macOS PDF toolkit built around redaction that removes content rather than covering it. After writing a file it re-opens its own output with an independent parser, searches for the material again, and refuses to save if anything is found. It also strips metadata, XMP, attachments, embedded scripts and hidden layers as part of the same operation, and a separate Inspector reports what any PDF still hides, including documents Basalt did not create. Everything runs on your Mac: the engine holds no network entitlement at all, which macOS enforces at the code-signature level. A one time $29 licence covers up to three Macs, free for the first 24 hours. basaltformac.com, or brew install --cask chipmunk1101/tap/basalt.
Redaction that proves itself
Basalt destroys the content you mark, then re-opens the file it wrote and proves the content is gone before it saves anything. Your documents never leave your Mac.