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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."
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...
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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.
Depends on on your level in the organization. If you do this and you're just a peon, you get fired. If you do this and you're the CEO, then a department gets axed and bunch of peons get fired, you retire with a several million dollar golden parachute and stock options.
This space available.
Without vacation he will make more mistakes
It's okay. He's from the government.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
This guy didn't make a mistake at all. He was following orders. The ones that made the mistake were the ones that told him to take the tapes home.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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."
Without more information it's hard to say exactly what happened. I could just picture this guy having "transport backup tape to offsite storage on your way from home" as part of his job duties. I used to do that for a company I worked for. I threw the tapes in my passenger seat and drove to the other location and dropped them off at the other office on my way home.
I could REALLY see how if I, say, stopped at a gas station on the way between the two to get gas and a galon of milk as I do sometimes on my way home. I leave the truck locked even when walking into the quick-e-mart for a minute to get the milk and pay for the gas, but even with that it's possible someone could break into my truck and steal anything that was convenient for a "smash and grab". There's nothing else in my truck that's not nailed down that would make an attractive item to quick grab, so those tapes would probably get snatched for lack of anything else to show for the theft.
I would not want major sanctions for being a victim of that theft, and arguably there's not much more you could have expected of me.
Do not hold the peon responsible for the company's unwillingness to provide appropriate security and to place a potentially very big onus on one lone employee, in the interest of saving a few bucks. VERY few businesses are willing to provide adequate protection under such circumstances. Mostly only those that are required to do so by law or agreement. (banks, companies handling credit card numbers, etc)
Now in such a situation, had I not even bothred to lock the truck, that doesn't make the theft any more legal, and unless there were some company policies in place saying "employees transporting backup tapes must leave their vehicle secured whenever unattended" (which until this happens once, you can bet the policy does not exist) then even in that case the employee should bear no additional responsibility,
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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