If you haven't been a victim of credit-card fraud yet, just wait. You probably will be at some point in your life. About 9 million Americans are victims of identity theft each year. To help protect consumers, the credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx and Discover) have joined to form the Payment Card Industry (PCI) working group. They set standards for how credit cards and cardholder informaiton is to be handled. If you accept payments on your website, even through PayPal, you need to adhere to these guidelines to protect your customers' payment information. Now I admit, none of us need more rules and regulations to live under. We have better things to do with our energies than go through a checklist that's been handed to us by some anonymous, faceless cabal. But sometimes it's really in our best interest, and in this case, in everybody's best interest.

If your business handles credit card payments, you need to be concerned about the rules and regulations of safeguarding the sensitive cardholder data. I was reminded of this the other day when a charge for $9.95 showed up on my debit card from a website I've never visited. Since 2007 any business that accepts credit card payment--this probably means you--has been subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). If you're a huge business that processes a million or more credit card transactions per year, you have to hire an outside professional to audit your processes. If you're smaller than that, you can do it yourself by means of the Self-Assessment Questionnaire, or SAQ. The SAQ comes in four flavors, depending upon...