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."

Comments

The guy's damn lucky.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Is that all they are going to do?

[MadJo]

Take away 1 week of vacation time?
If I screw up that bad at my work, I'd be facing a discharge...

Re:Is that all they are going to do?

[ritesonline]

What more do you want?

Sounds like the guy's a long timer who was doing his job and now has to carry the can to protect his pension.

From the article: "The tape was pilfered in June from the car of an intern responsible for carrying data used by the Ohio state government's computer systems...described Miller as a "stellar longtime DAS employee" and said he has been forthright in acknowledging his role in the "management glitch" pertaining to the stolen backup tape."

This wasn't some guy who took a company laptop home to play games, it was his responsibility and no extra security was provided for him to do his job. Would you like everyone else robbed at work to forfeit leave or be sacked? The "management glitch" is probably that his bosses wouldn't stump up for secure transport of the tapes.

Gee.

[skulgnome]

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.)

Some quick considerations...

[physicsphairy]

First of all, you can't fine him "$3 million", (a) because he couldn't pay it, (b) because then you probably have to pay people close to that amount just to convince them the financial risk of the job was worth taking.

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.