Charles Chandler of the Charlotte Observer has taken a look at the annual financial filings that the NFL Players Association is required to submit to the U.S. Department of Labor, and he picks out this detail to focus on: The players’ union spent $12,461 on document shredding between March 1, 2007 and February 29, 2008.

That payment went to Office Shredders, a company based in Elkridge, Maryland. Chandler reports that shredding documents is routine when a company moves offices, as the Players’ Association did, but that NFLPA Executive Director Gene Upshaw “reacted sharply” when the Observer asked about the document shredding.

“Your knowingly malicious attempt to link the routine practice of protecting the confidentiality of financial and other proprietary business records (a practice that every prudent business follows) with ongoing litigation and Congressional oversight hearings is libelous,” Upshaw wrote in an e-mail to the Observer Friday.

The Observer calculates that at the commonly used rate of 10 cents per pound, the amount paid by the NFLPA to Office Shredders would equal 124,610 pounds, or more than 62 tons of shredded documents.

Upshaw did not respond to a question of whether the union kept a record of what was shredded.