Personal Information Of Some Tulsa Employees Revealed After Documents Left On Curb

Posted on Aug 17, 2010 in Records Management News

Part of the state­ment released by Amer­i­can Fidelity.
By Lori Full­bright, The News On 6

TULSA, OK — Doc­u­ments con­tain­ing names, social secu­rity num­bers and salaries from employ­ees of dozens of com­pa­nies, includ­ing some in Tulsa, were left sit­ting on a curb in an Edmond, Okla­homa neighborhood.

That was more than two years ago.

A hus­band and wife saw the stor­age con­tain­ers on the curb and decided to pick them up. When they dis­cov­ered the boxes were full of con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion, they weren’t sure what to do, so they put the doc­u­ments in secured storage.

They recently re-discovered them and called News On 6 par­ent com­pany, Grif­fin Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, when they noticed some of our employ­ees were in the file.

The cou­ple did not want to appear on camera.

They are forms peo­ple filled out to choose an insur­ance plan, that con­tain salaries, social secu­rity num­bers, birth dates, depen­dents; pri­vate infor­ma­tion that could be used by criminals.

The cou­ple that found them was at a loss as to what to do.

Woman: “We were emp­ty­ing them and came across these fold­ers that made us frankly, kinda mad because people’s lives are in here.” “I have Dean Blevins, a lot of your staff members,social secu­rity num­bers, depen­dents, all their infor­ma­tion, when they get paid, all that is in here.”

Because Grif­fin Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is in the files, all employ­ees received an email from our Human Resources depart­ment, let­ting us know our infor­ma­tion could have poten­tially been compromised.

The doc­u­ments are from 2003 and 2004 and don’t seem to con­tain med­ical information.

Employ­ees from The Tulsa Fair­grounds were also in the files, which didn’t make CEO Mark Andrus very happy.

“There’s a rea­son it’s called con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion and one of the def­i­n­i­tions of that, if you go down the list is, do not leave in a file cab­i­net on a curb,” Andrus said.

Grif­fin Com­mu­ni­ca­tions gave the files back to Amer­i­can Fidelity who plans to notify all the com­pa­nies affected.

Amer­i­can Fidelity sent Grif­fin Com­mu­ni­ca­tions a state­ment that said:

We have a respon­si­bil­ity to safe­guard our cus­tomers’ infor­ma­tion. Though it appears these doc­u­ments have been safely secured since they were obtained a few years ago, they should have never left our pos­ses­sion. There is no evi­dence at this time that the infor­ma­tion has been mis­used, and we believe the like­li­hood of mis­use is low. We have requested the con­tact infor­ma­tion of the per­son who had pos­ses­sion of this infor­ma­tion for the last few years to sup­port our inves­ti­ga­tion. The source has refused to be iden­ti­fied. We have an oblig­a­tion to our cus­tomers to thor­oughly review this mat­ter, includ­ing ask­ing the proper author­i­ties for assis­tance if nec­es­sary. Addi­tion­ally, we are con­stantly eval­u­at­ing ways to strengthen and enhance our infor­ma­tion secu­rity pro­ce­dures. We are in the process of noti­fy­ing those cus­tomers involved. We regret this hap­pened and apol­o­gize. Trust is at the heart of what we do for our cus­tomers, and we will do what is right.

Grif­fin Com­mu­ni­ca­tions dis­cov­ered there is no state law that says how med­ical records must be stored or destroyed, but there are penal­ties for han­dling them with negligence.

Read more: http://www.newson6.com/Global/story.asp?S=12989291

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