It is, unfortunately, very common to find that is nearly impossible to donate old computers. In my 15-plus years in the tech business, I found again and again that when we were replacing out-dated but perfectly functional computers that we couldn’t give the computers away to save our lives. Charities and not-for-profits want late-model computers like everyone else, it’s extraordinarily expensive to ship computers to foreign countries (not least because of import and export duties and mounds of red tape), schools often don’t have the space, manpower, or funds to handle an influx of additional computers, etc., etc., etc. We had charities with *no* computers at all tell us that they’d rather we give them the equivalent dollar value of the old computers in cash so they could buy one or two new ones rather than take 15 to 20 old ones from us. (In truth, computers depreciate to a value of $0 in about three to five years.) So I could see how the asset disposal is an ordinary act with no implications at all for any kind of scandal.

Regarding wiping drives: Drilling the platter works, but so does a degausser. Our practice was to remove all drives from all computers before disposal and to store them away in a safe. We never new when they might become important again.