Now that's a good idea - where I work, our security policy is such that I should be able to destroy any (company) computing equipment an end user is using and the loss of data should be restricted to their unsaved changes. A test like you propose would be a very memorable reminder for information security awareness, and so might be really effective before infrastructure upgrades if restricted to people with hardware about to be phased out, you need to nuke old hard drives at that point anyway...
Not exactly related but 7-8 years ago a company in the region had a major virus outbreak. There was some kind of zero day worm running through their environment and despite having updated endpoint protection they still got got.
They didn't feel they had any choice but to hire about 50 temp folks from a local contracting company and run through the entire desktop environment and pull drives, re-image, reinstall. They did this over the course of a weekend and on Monday when employees came back they found their desktops wiped clean. Within an hour the site lead started getting calls and visits from panic stricken employees that had kept all sorts of personal info on those machines...photos, emails, documents, etc.
All gone.
They ended up missing one machine that got powered up that Monday and re-infected the entire campus. Had to do the same thing again.
