County improperly disposed of documents, told no one

Posted on Jul 14, 2010 in Records Management News

10,600 peo­ple pos­si­bly affected; com­mis­sion­ers opt to ‘wait and see if there is any response from clients’

By Josh Sweigart, Staff Writer
12:58 AM Sun­day, June 13, 2010
HAMILTON — When a mound of Mid­dle­town city doc­u­ments con­tain­ing people’s pri­vate infor­ma­tion was found in a pub­lic Dump­ster this spring, it wasn’t the first — or largest — such secu­rity breach by a local gov­ern­ment.
An inves­ti­ga­tion by this news­pa­per has found that But­ler County’s Depart­ment of Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices learned in 2008 that con­fi­den­tial records from that agency were being “peri­od­i­cally” improp­erly dis­posed of in a pub­lic bin.
An inter­nal analy­sis by the agency found that 10,600 peo­ple could have been affected.
This is the num­ber of peo­ple who used the JFS office at 4122 Tonya Trail in Fair­field Twp., where the doc­u­ments orig­i­nated. They included case notes and ver­i­fi­ca­tion forms deal­ing with the Ohio Works First, food stamps, Med­ic­aid and child care pro­grams.
Though the records were sup­posed to be shred­ded using a doc­u­ment dis­posal com­pany, county offi­cials found that office had been sim­ply throw­ing the records in a recy­cling bin.
That’s where they were found by a mem­ber of the pub­lic on July 18, 2008.
The county took action to make sure the records were dis­posed of prop­erly, and con­sid­ered noti­fy­ing the peo­ple who may have had infor­ma­tion com­pro­mised.
Offi­cials drafted a let­ter sug­gest­ing peo­ple could use a free Inter­net ser­vice to guard against iden­tity theft.
But they never sent the notice out.
Instead, they decided to “wait and see if there is any response from clients,” accord­ing to inter­nal memos.
Two years later, those clients still have no knowl­edge their infor­ma­tion could have been com­pro­mised.
“They should have told us from the very begin­ning,” said Christina Cruz, who used the JFS office dur­ing that time.
County held back on response to a records breach
When Jerome Kearns first saw the pile of con­fi­den­tial records from his office in a Dump­ster by But­ler Tech, he thought they were stolen.
It was July 18, 2008. County records lay out in detail what hap­pened next: what county offi­cials did — and didn’t — do.
There were piles of papers — files from But­ler County Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices, where Kearns is assis­tant direc­tor, and from LifeS­pan, the county engineer’s office, Chil­dren Ser­vices, and But­ler County Child Sup­port Enforce­ment Agency.
Some of the records con­tained con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion, such as case notes and eli­gi­bil­ity ver­i­fi­ca­tions for food stamps, Ohio Works First, sub­si­dized child care and Med­ic­aid pro­grams.
Kearns esti­mates there were about 10 60-gallon trash bags of records. He called co-worker Adam Jones because Jones had a pickup truck.
“They weren’t going to fit in my Elantra,” Kearns said. “There was a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of records there.”
The records had been found by a mem­ber of the pub­lic.
“Some mem­ber of the com­mu­nity (was) throw­ing their stuff in there, and picked one up and thought they were impor­tant,” Kearns said.
Kearns took the records back to where they pre­sum­ably came from, the JFS office at 4122 Tonya Trail, off Lib­erty Fair­field Road in Fair­field Twp.
Doc­u­ments pitched ‘peri­od­i­cally’
It didn’t take long to solve the mys­tery.
The next day, Kearns asked Kim Gay, man­ager of that office, where the bins were that she used for con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion. In other county offices, spe­cial bins were peri­od­i­cally picked up by the com­pany Royal Doc­u­ment Destruc­tion for shred­ding.
The Fair­field Twp. office, which had been open since Jan­u­ary 2007, had no such bins. Staffers there had been throw­ing records in the recy­cling bins. Believ­ing that there was no con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion involved, a worker for But­ler County Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices, which han­dles recy­cling for county offices, “had dumped these bins at com­mu­nity sites peri­od­i­cally over the last six months,” Kearns wrote later.
County offi­cials went into action

Read more here: http://www.oxfordpress.com/news/oxford-news/county-improperly-disposed-of-documents-told-no-one-759626.html