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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."
Isn't the company responsible for negligence carried out by an employee in the course of his duties...
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.
How frequently do your vacations include flying across an ocean? If your trip is any shorter, it isn't at all equivalent to leaving the US.
The real reason many people never leave the USA is because it's simply a huge place, spanning a large continent. Also, everything most people could want to see in their lifetime can be found inside the US. Here in the west, in a day I can drive from my house, to the tallest mountain in the contiguous US (4421m, Mt Whitney), past the oldest living organism (Methuselah tree) on earth, through a forest with the tallest trees on earth (Sequoia), to the lowest point on the content, right through the area with the highest recorded temperature on the planet, then, for good measure, round off the day by visiting The Grand Canyon.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I worked in the same division as Jerry years ago. At the time he was silo'd (not his choice) in a $40 million failed attempt to replace the cobol-assembler payroll system with an "off the shelf" Dunn & Bradstreet mainframe product. The project was called HRMS. It went on for something like 18 years. Each year the folks several positions above Jerry kept pushing for more funding to get it completed. For 15 years they were "just a few more months" away from completion. Along came Y2K and in mid 1998, the external auditors finally got the message above to the cabinet that come 2000 the payroll system would cease to function. Due to HRMS always being 6 months from completion, any budget that was tied to maintenance of the cobol system got sucked away into the HRMS void. Jerry would often just smile to our questions about the status of the HRMS, he wanted to say what wasn't right about it, but kept quiet to keep his job.
So, in 1998 with backs up against the wall and through some heroic effort on the part of Bob Cruse's staff, the cobol system was given enough resources including myself to remediate the system.
You would think that in 2000 they would have pulled the plug; nope, and that's a reason I left. Instead it was 2001 or 2002 that they finally called HRMS suck cost. Jerry had fewer options being a state life'r; to get his pension he needed to stay for 30 yrs.
Immediately following the disolution of HRMS, they took the same architects involved in HRMS and tossed in additional incompitent pointy hairs and created the OAKS project.
My former boss was added to the group and one of his backup strategies was to take our network backs home on tape. Sound familiar? We secretly revolted and instead sent them to another state office.
That is what I know about Jerry and now I'm going to guess and say this went above Jerry and he's taking the fall.