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Ohio Official Docked Vacation Time For Stolen Tape
Lucas123 writes "The missing tape, stolen from an intern's car, contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers. The state believes the incident will cost them $3 million. So after four months of deliberation, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services
announced today that they decided to take a week's vacation away from Jerry Miller, their payroll team leader and the guy in charge of the missing data."
That's like what? 2, 3 hours of coffee breaks in the private sector?
So, if this cost them $3 million, and they took a week's vacation away, his yearly salary must be $156 million. I think I know where I should be looking for a job now.
Isn't the company responsible for negligence carried out by an employee in the course of his duties...
Imagine what would have happened to him if he'd been busted sharing a couple of dozen copyrighted songs online. Probably would've had his sick-leave cancelled too.
Take away 1 week of vacation time?
If I screw up that bad at my work, I'd be facing a discharge...
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
I smell lawsuits!
would feel a bit differently if they are one of those who will get victimized (ID theft for one) as a consequence of this slip up. It may yet happen.
Tired and stressed people make more mistakes. Without vacation he will make more mistakes.
But of course, it's all about the revenge. Water droplets? Arm/leg twister? Acid (.. music)? Tazers! It sure will help with the lost records!
From personal experience, trying to do more work and cut off your vacation is the most sure-fire way to bring your work quality and productivity down.
Are they trying to set him up to lose another tape?
I wonder how much those four months of deliberation cost them. All that work just for some petty punishment. (of course you yanks only get like six days of paid vacation a year, so maybe it's harsher from your perspective, lol.)
Admittedly it was not smart of the guy to leave the tape in the car. But changing procedures concerning handling these kind of data, is like saying something was wrong with the system from the beginning. Why not take a weeks vacation from the guy who is responsible for the procedures?
Okay, so the state thinks it will cost them $3 million. That's all well and good, but the real damages from this security breach will likely be much, much greater.
We're talking about personal information for 131,100 people here. ID theft being all the rage these days, and assuming that all these people are screwed, $3,000,000 comes out to just over $22 a person.
I doubt that every last person getting targetted will be the case... And I have no idea what the average ID theft victim ends up losing (I imagine that's hard to quantify - with direct losses, the time and money spent repairing the damage, and the impact on your credit history). Even so, I think a lowball estimate would be 25% of these people getting cheated out of an average of $3,000 or so. That right there is a little over $98 million.
Now then, I'm the first to admit that I could very well be grossly overestimating things... But really, come on now - a weeks vacation for what could potentially cost the state and it's citizens over a hundred million dollars? Hell, if I could get away with that kind of misconduct with penalties like that, I might just "steal" that tape from myself.
A week? Isn't that about half an annual allowance in the US? /me is smug with 27 days.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Will we really have to wait for every ID in US to be stolen before some laws on mandatory encryption on privacy data are passed ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Also, it's evident it wasn't 100% on him. The data was stolen from an intern's car. He bears the indirect culpability of not encrypting it, not backing it, trusting the intern, whatever. It's natural to feel that "heads should roll" but why should the onus of all this fall necessarily on him? (Well, maybe it all should--I'm just going off the blurb in the summary.)
On the other side of it, a week's vacation time is ridiculous, whether or not he's at fault. If he is, well, there should be a real punishment. If he's not, it's fairly idiotic to slap him around just for the show of doing so.
And how much did the four-month long investigation cost? If it was more than a week of this guy's vacation time... yeah, well, that was another win for the taxpayers, wasn't it?
The way it should have worked is that there should have been a clearly defined set of rules, a clearly defined set of responsibilities, and a clearly defined set of repercussions. When employee X neglected responsibility Y, he should have already been aware that Z would be the punishment, and Z should have been what happened immediately afterward. You might need a four month investigation to find the harddrive thief, but you shouldn't need more than a week to handle violations of internal policies.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
They are going to put him on paid administrative leave for 30 days. :)
From my experience people who do grossly inappropriate things get usually kicked out of the company. If these two get just this minor punishment it might be because the organization did not have clear enough policies and procedures for storing and handling the data. If there are no rules or employees do not know them, people can not be held accountable for any wrongdoing. If this is the case, even this vacation time punishment is too severe.
On the other hand, maybe the organization subscribes to the principle of giving people a second chance.
I read it as the others were going on vacation to not have to deal with him but actually, they took HIS vacation away, they didnt take a vacation away from him
Particles, stuff that matters.
Hell, can I work there and "lose" a tape as well? I mean, a week vacation time less is quite ok, from the money I make when I sell that tape to the local papers I can make the rest of my vacation time worth that lost week.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The guy made a mistake. We don't know him or the situation. He may be otherwise great at his job.
What's all this crap about his punishment should match the cost of the mistake rubbish?
If a doctor makes a mistake and a patient dies, do we kill the doctor?
the last thing they want is for him to be showing up to work more often.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Well, that seems reasonable. I'm glad they found a good way to deal with this situation.
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Mr. Miller announced "Well, fuck it," and decide to revoke all Payroll DB access rights, delete the tables and go on "permanent" vacation from the job. Problem solved!
On a more serious note.... what happened to the intern?
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Happy tenth birthday Slashdot. Spelling is more like seven, though.
I recieved one of those lovely "We lost your data" letters ... 2 months after the incident. So, as one of the individuals who was personally impacted by this, I'd like to say a few things:
1) Their IT staff is incompetent. In my department, we ship over 50TB a week to our DR facility in England. We have had instances where tapes were lost in transit (thanks FedEx!) but the data was encrypted. No harm, no foul. That being said, their idea of sending tapes offsite was to put it in the back of an intern's car. GENIUS!
2) This petty hand-slaping is absurd. Yes, I want the idiot fired and replaced by someone who gives a damn about data management, security, and data classification.
3) 2 months to contact people who were on the tapes?! FFS!
4) Their incident handling in the media was that the criminals would need "specialized knowledge and tools" to extract the information. It says what kind of tape it is right on the case! That, and a little Google go a long way. Stop feeding the public a line of BS and own up to the fact that it's really not that hard to get the data off the tape.
There are others, but those are the ones that are pissing me off at the moment.
Announcer: "Jerry Miller, you just caused the loss of $3 million for the state of Ohio, and negatively impacted the lives of more than 100,000 people. What are you going to do next?"
Miller: "I am apparently NOT going to Disney World."
No wonder they haven't done "Who Wants To Be A Turkish Millionaire" on Howard Stern lately!
He'll be severely whipped with a wet noodle! That'll teach him!
...the Eighth Amendment?
It is rare that a person accepts responsibility in the private sector, it is even more rare that they accept it in the civil service. It goes to show that this man has a decent moral character.
"The state believes the incident will cost them $3 million." $3 million?...wow...i wonder i long can i spent all of this money...i think i can start tourism now if i have that amount of money...how lucky the thief who stoled it...hehehe
If there was no policy on tape security then how is it his fault? I take my tapes home, granted i don't leave it in my car. I do leave it in my house ... and it could be stolen.
This is what iron mountain is for.
IMO, they couldn't have got much harsher in penalty without firing the guy. Vacations are necessary for sanity, especially for government employees. (If you disagree, you're already insane. You should have taken more vacations.)
Mishandling sensitive data of over 100,000 people resulting in it being stolen = lose 1 weeks vacation pay
Downloading some MP3's off P2P = lose $222,000 to RIAA
"Ow!"
As an additional penalty they will be suspending him with pay for 1 week. The start date is TBD. :-)
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Why was the important tape being kept in an intern's car in the first place?
Was it scotch or duct?
Because we just wrangled a build this morning, and I could use some scotch.
- The Amazina Llama
He didn't get fired, and if you're upset that he didn't get fired, consider the situation from the point of view of someone who doesn't hate managers on principle and is interested more in the health of the company. Why get rid of a perfectly good executive when you don't have to? It's easy to get the department back in working order if you're replacing a peon, but not if you are replacing the department head. So the intern is toast, but the guy 3 levels above him stays because it's better for the company that way. It's not like anyone should expect the business world to be fair in the first place (else why does my boss get payed so much more than me?), so why are you surprised?
Relax I just want some peanuts.
gives it time to "blow over"
It cost the department 3 million and they just take 1 week of his vacation.Some people are born with lucky stars in their ass
The reality of the situation is his superiors see him as so valuable they did practically nothing. This is up there with "These are not the droids you are looking for."
If you could bottle whatever that is, I'd be first in line.
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thats a lame punishment, he should be beaten with 486 laptops by a group of angry midgets.. er i mean little people
It's no surprise: this is how Ohio and it's entrenched culture of corruption operates. If they started firing people for losing confidential data and costing the state millions of dollars... why, someone might start thinking there is something wrong with all the hundreds of millions other "Good Republicans" are liberating from the state.
Look at the "coin scammer" dude. He will get a slap on the wrist too, even though he was blatantly embezzling from the state worker's pension fund.
Then we can also jump to the Federal level, where the DOJ is permanently sitting on hundreds of cases involving war profiteering in Iraq. This is the face of conservative government. The only answer is to vote them all out, and make sure none of the bastards ever get elected again... if they ever get out of prison.
In half of the article they call it a drive, and in half they call it a tape... Which one is missing? There's quite a bit of difference. If it's just a hard drive, any joe schmoe can plug it in and get your data. If it's a tape, they may at least have to first drop a thousand bucks on a machine capable of reading the type of tape you've got. They also didn't mention whether the data was encrypted. If I were an Ohio taxpayer and these were the only ramifications of mishandling data in this way I'd be extremely unhappy. I hate to say it, but an example needs to be made. Identity theft is rampant and ridiculous mistakes like these are part of the reason why.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
If you're a hard-working go-getter in the public sector, more power to you. There definitely are some folks in government who are hard working. My wife, when she worked for the city, was one of them. But it's not the banker's hours or some nefarious "agenda" of pundits that drives public opinion.
The real issue is that the perception the public has isn't drawn from the class of "all government workers.". The public's perception is based on things like the California DMV offices, where dozens of citizens stand in long lines while about 50% of the "workers" behind the counters engage in banter, sit idly staring off into space, and generally appear to be doing nothing much; or the city clerk's office, where the belligerent receptionist can barely contain her indignation that you've interrupted her game of Solitaire to tell her you've arrived for an appointment; or county road workers, who are frequently seen in groups of seven or eight, where one guy is digging and the rest are all leaning on shovels/brooms, and chatting on cell phones; or the folks who are so hidebound that they can't imagine a solution to a problem that hasn't been carefully documented in the official handbook; and on, and on, and on.
Until all the citizen-visible positions in government are filled by hardworking, customer-service oriented folks who take their breaks out of site of the waiting area (an outcome so unlikely as to be impossible) the perception isn't going to change.
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This is typical government BS. I work for a gov. organization and they never fire anybody for any reason. Most of the time people get promoted for being idiots.
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
Hi Mr. Troll, meet Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, meet Mr. Troll.
Flying across the Atlantic is expensive and time consuming. Less expensive and time consuming that it was by boat before the airplane, but still expensive and time consuming.
Most Americans are unlikely to make it to Europe more than once or twice, at most, because it's expensive. A 10k-15k trip is a LOT of money for most people, and if they do the trip, it's likely a lifetime of wanting to go. Of those that do go, they likely get to see a half dozen cities in Europe, with limited exposure.
Most Europeans don't make it here either. They may make a trip to New York City, or a vacation in Miami, FL, but they won't see America. Europeans will never travel to Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. There is a LOT to the United States, many different subcultures, not so disimilar to the EU's collection of countries, other than the Union here is MUCH more established, has a shared language, and actually ratified it's Constitution.
Complaining that Americans don't routinely travel to different European Cities is about as fair as complaining the Europeans fail to make trips to Albany, NY or other cities that they have no interest in.
Since there is now a precedent established, (Captiol v Thomas ) Perhaps I should copyright my Social Security Number. Then, if my personal identification was lost by incompetent security procedures and as such "Made Available" for theft. I would be entitled to dammages...
Why is it that these stupid puns are consistently rated "5" here? Is this place really that pitiful? I think I just answered my own question.
They decided to dock him the vacation time instead of fining him $3 Mil, because they realized that if they fined him $3 Mil, the only way he could pay would be to steal confidential data and sell it off...
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I'm curious as to why you artificially terminate each line. Are you trying to write poetry?
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Most Americans don't take their allotment of vacation anyways, so it's a week that this guy, in all probability, wasn't going to use. So, how is he being punished again?
1. "Stupidly" give sensitive data to intern, knowing he'll take it somewhere in his car.
2. Steal tape from car, since you know precisely where it is.
3. Sell data for PROFIT!!!!!
4. Get docked a week's vacation, but who cares, you just got rich!
Ohioans are supposed to be pretty average, dull, predictable plodders (at least in the eyes of New Yorkers - if you're watching from, say, Iowa, maybe they're exciting daredevils). Criminal scandals took down most of their Republicans in the past few years, following the landmark corruption shown in their 2004 election fraud.
What is it about Ohioans that such a culture of permissive corruption flourishes in their state?
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make install -not war
Interesting. Pretty sure in California, this would be illegal. Accrued vacation is considered part of your compensation, hence the strict rules about vacation payout on the last day. My understanding is that even the usual process of capping vacation time at N*yearly accrual is dodgy; essentially, it's a pay cut, and should trigger an unemployment insurance event for decrease of pay.
I've noticed that companies here have quit saying you "lose" vacation time and instead that you "no longer accrue," and I assume that's why. If they gave it to you to lose, it's not theirs to take.
All that said, they didn't can his ass why?
I want to trade in my vacation time now :D :D
They *estimate* a week. It's really until he writes out all of the compromised numbers longhand.
:)
A nun has been recalled from retirement to stand over him with a ruler and make sure he writes them *neatly*.
hawk