Unresolved Login Issue Prevented Florida 'Concealed Weapon' Background Checks For Over a Year (tampabay.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Tampa Bay Times For more than a year, the state of Florida failed to conduct national background checks on tens of thousands of applications for concealed weapons permits, potentially allowing drug addicts or people with a mental illness to carry firearms in public... The employee in charge of the background checks could not log into the system, the investigator learned. The problem went unresolved until discovered by another worker in March 2017 -- meaning that for more than a year applications got approved without the required background check.

During that time, which coincided with the June 12, 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub that left 50 dead, the state saw an unprecedented spike in applications for concealed weapons permits. There were 134,000 requests for permits in the fiscal year ending in June 2015. The next 12 months broke a record, 245,000 applications, which was topped again in 2017 when the department received 275,000 applications... There are now 1.8 million concealed weapon permit holders in Florida.
The employee with the login issue, who has since been fired, "told the Times she had been working in the mailroom when she was given oversight of the database in 2013. 'I didn't understand why I was put in charge of it.'"

Comments

None of that matters

[Anonymous Coward]

Employee is given a task, then doesn't do it, because cannot.
Boss doesn't find out for over a year that employee didn't do the assigned work.

My first thought is that it isn't really fair to fire the employee for that, but that really depends on whether she made clear to her boss she couldn't do the job. And why not give her the old job back, was she no good at that? If not, why give her oversight of this database? Do explain that one, please.

But the boss not finding out about it for over a year? Or the boss' boss? And so on? That's inexcusable. They're supposed to know that sort of thing, that's their job. So if any heads are to roll, I expect at least several levels of middle management to start sprouting vacancies. If not, the firing of managers shall continue until the idiocy stops.

Right up to the governor if necessary. Go on, have a full-blown election with only new candidates over the firing of an ex-mailroom clerk. Or what is this democracy thing for, anyway?

Re:None of that matters

[irving47]

They probably "HAD" to fire her when it became clear it was going to become public knowledge... Yeah, something doesn't sound right.

Re:None of that matters

[Zocalo]

She was 'given oversight of the database' of the DB in 2013. Failed to run the checks, starting in 2015. Not a very good liar.

You missed a rather relevant bit from the middle of TFS:

On April 7, 2016, 40 days after records show the department stopped using the database, Wilde reported to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that her log-in to the background check system wasn't working.

So it looks like the checks were progressing just fine until late February 2016, which implies that Wilde's login was presumably working from 2013 through until some point around then, depending on how long the system could run without Wilde logging in. Sure, Wilde dropped the ball by failing to follow up when it wasn't resolved but, regardless of that failure, her supervisors (and their supervisors, etc., etc.) also failed to query a massive spike in concealled carry permits on the books - up over 40% in just two years. Setting aside the issue of gun control, it takes a whole other level of managerial incompetence to fail to react to a stat like that.

Re:None of that matters

[Zocalo]

No, I'd have likely fired Wilde too, but certainly a minimum of a disciplinary for sitting on the broken login for so long without following up and getting her supervisor(s) involved to escalate it, and quite likely her supervisors would be investigated for potential incompetence as well. The problem is that the story doesn't really detail what her role and interaction with the system was, what kind of proportion of her working day it was meant to occupy, or how much supervision this part of her job was subject to, all of which are quite relevant if you are trying to work out what might be an appropriate response from your armchair. That her employer did fire her is really all we have.

Clearly the sheer number of applications wouldn't allow manual processing of the forms by a single person, even if it was just to review each application was correctly completed and send it on, so her role seems most likely to have been either managing the batch processing of submitted forms or supervising a team's work. For instance, iIf that was only a small part of her job then that doesn't necessarily mean she was just "acting busy", and if her involvement with the system was periodic - say every several weeks - then the apparent 40 day delay in calling support could actually be a non-issue. Regardless of any possible mitigating circumstances that clearly were not sufficient to get her off the hook, it seems pretty clear that the entire department is suffering from the symptoms of "good enough for government work", and the buck for that kind of issue stops in the Governor's office.