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 his salary must be...

[patman600 (669121)]

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.

Re:

[User 956 (568564)]

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.

I wouldn't be so sure. It took them four months of deliberation to make that determination. From that, I'm guessing they're using some kind of magic-8-ball-fueled-fractal-algorithm to come up with these figures, which means you very well could end up earning a salary in turkish lire, if you're not careful.

Re:

[MrMr (219533)]

I would settle for 3 million turkish lira a year...

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=3000000&from=TRY&to=USD&submit=Convert [yahoo.com]

Re:

[Bloke down the pub (861787)]

I don't know [flies up in the air] Aaaaaargh!

Re:

[ragefan (267937)]

The New Turkish Lira or the Old Turkish Lira? :P

That's nobody's business but the Turks!

Turkish Millionaire

[Night Goat (18437)]

No wonder they haven't done "Who Wants To Be A Turkish Millionaire" on Howard Stern lately!

Re:So his salary must be...

[Gordonjcp (186804)]

which means you very well could end up earning a salary in turkish lire, if you're not careful

Or worse, US Dollars...

Isn't..

[by Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the company responsible for negligence carried out by an employee in the course of his duties...

Re:Isn't..

[baileydau (1037622)]

Isn't the company responsible for negligence carried out by an employee in the course of his duties...

Yes they are ... That is with respect to any external parties that may have been harmed.

Even though the company is liable for any negligence, they have the option of internal sanctions against any negligent employee.

That's why he only got docked 1 weeks holiday, not the entire $3M

The guy's damn lucky.

[by 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.

Re:

[martin-boundary (547041)]

That's terrible, next time he gets the flu he'll be forced to come into the office and infect everybody there...

Re:The guy's damn lucky.

[BVis (267028)]

Hmm.

Allow personal information on tens of thousands of people to get out due to massive incompetence, costing the state millions and potentially ruining the credit of everyone whose info was on the tape, lose a weeks' vacation.

Share music online at no cost of any sort to the copyright holders, and then get railroaded through an ignorant and corrupt legal system, and get fined several times your yearly salary.

Is Canada hiring?

Is that all they are going to do?

[MadJo (674225)]

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 (1155575)]

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.

Re:Is that all they are going to do?

[HeWhoMustNotBeNamed (1058944)]

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.

Re:Is that all they are going to do?

[buckeyeguy (525140)]

So it says he's a "payroll team lead", which seems to hint that he's still a bargaining unit (read: union) employee and not management. That would explain the odd-sounding penalty; iirc, firing a bargaining unit employee pretty much took an act of god to do.

--> (Was a State employee for 10 years; knew 2 people who were fired in that time.)

Re:

[Opportunist (166417)]

You, me, pretty much everyone in the private sector, I'd say.

But hey, that guy just lost data, not something important. Considering the way our other officials hand out our data like candy, that blunder is just a nuisance because, well, the general population got to know about it. So they had to do something about it.

Think Sony and rootkit.

Re:

[Sloppy (14984)]

If I screw up that bad at my work, I'd be facing a discharge...

Yeah, that's probably the usual case.

But you're thinking in terms of an employee. Imagine you're a manager (I mean Jerry Miller's boss, not Jerry Miller the manager of the intern). One of your people just did something horribly destructive. Something has to be done, but think: what is there to gain by firing him? Miller has already soiled his pants and he's probably not going to make the same mistake again.

The question you face is, was

I bet those judging him

[rolfwind (528248)]

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.

Wrong punishment

[El_Muerte_TDS (592157)]

Tired and stressed people make more mistakes. Without vacation he will make more mistakes.

Re:Wrong punishment

[BadAnalogyGuy (945258)]

Without vacation he will make more mistakes

It's okay. He's from the government.

Re:

[Durrok (912509)]

My father works for Heidelberg (Big printing press company) and does copier repair. When he installs a new copier at a government facility he has to be sure to arrange it so he is done before noon because the managers at the site will usually tell him "Oh it's after lunch, our employees are tired. Come back tomorrow." Everyone is usually playing solitaire or hanging out by the water cooler. You wonder why government projects take so long and usually go over budget..

Re:

[mgblst (80109)]

Yeah, but this guy isn't making mistakes because he is tired or stressed. His problem is pure incompetence. It is not like he can be more incompetent, because he didn't get enough rest.

This is a joke, and a big problem in our society. Incompetence is rarely punished, something that you see all the time in the political world.

Re:Wrong punishment

[MMC Monster (602931)]

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.

Re:Wrong punishment

[v1 (525388)]

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,

Re:

[FredDC (1048502)]

If anything, they should give him more vacation!

If he screws up this badly, more work (and more opportunities to screw up) is the last thing you wanna give him IMHO...

Let's torture him next!

[suv4x4 (956391)]

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?

Gee.

[skulgnome (1114401)]

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.)

Re:

[TubeSteak (669689)]

I wonder how much those four months of deliberation cost them.

Probably not very much.
If you've any experience with bureaucracy, when they say stuff like "4 months" they really mean "we took 4 months to schedule the 1~3 meetings required to reach a decision."

All that work just for some petty punishment.

Like I said, they probably didn't do much work. For all you know, they took 4 months just to let the original issue fade so that their 'punishment' wouldn't get pulled into the national news.

I'd look at the "petty punishment" as something they felt compelled to do, because to do otherwise would be to admit outrig

$3 million?

[Palpitations (1092597)]

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?

[caluml (551744)]

A week? Isn't that about half an annual allowance in the US? </troll> /me is smug with 27 days.

Re:A week?

[evilviper (135110)]

No wonder you guys never get a chance to leave the US and see what the rest of the world is about.

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.

Re:A week?

[fullmetal55 (698310)]

Well, I can do a lot of that, but a lot of it doesn't interest me. I can visit the Rockies, go see the columbia ice fields, relax in hotsprings, go to the top of a mountain, all within a days drive of me too, but I'd rather go on a vacation where I can see really old buildings (over 300 years old), visit new cultures, experience new foods, see the world from a different viewpoint. I've seen the natural wonders my fine country (Canada) has to offer, and loved them, but I also want to see other places, and learn other cultures. there's only so much sightseeing you can do.

Re:

[fullmetal55 (698310)]

Where did I ridicule anyone? please let me know. or is it that i dared to disagree with you, if so why does stating my differing opinion injure you so much? there was nothing I said that was worthy of being attacked for. and our "strange and exotic foods" are all pretty much from other places, we don't really have a national cuisine. And the ones that generally cause the "midnight dash" are typically US corporate food chain restaurants. (McFood)

And where did Spring Break and wet t-shirt contests come i

Re:

[caluml (551744)]

Also, a little known fact - the UK has only just (in the last year or 2) paid off the debt that they had with the US. Apparently, the US offered to help, as long as the UK paid all their troop costs, fuel costs, etc. The UK has been paying it off slowly since 1945, although the US let us off the interest. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6215847.stm [bbc.co.uk]

Encryption, encryption, encryption...

[Yvanhoe (564877)]

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 ?

Some quick considerations...

[physicsphairy (720718)]

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.

Smells bad

[LadyBug@FI (110420)]

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.

Mistake

[pubjames (468013)]

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?

After 4 hours of deliberation...

[Jtheletter (686279)]

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?

Re:

[pbemfun (265334)]

The intern was fired a few weeks after this happened. As was the intern's immediate supervisor and the supervisor's manager.

What are you going to do next...

[by Anonymous Coward]

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."

I'm Impressed

[sskinnider (1069312)]

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.

You are an outlier

[blueZ3 (744446)]

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 stan

Re:What's that in private sector terms?

[Jafafa Hots (580169)]

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.

But

[KKlaus (1012919)]

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?

Re:But

[Duhavid (677874)]

But if the source of the error was the CEO, the firing the
peons does nothing good for the company. The problem still
exists. And the health of the company took a dip, potentially,
as the workers fired might have been competent, the incompetent
is still there, and the remaining workers will see this, and
they usually are not fooled, and will be demoralized, lowering
their productivity temporarily, and the best of the people there
will be more likely to move to another company.

Has nothing to do with hating managers "on principal". Has nothing
to do with fair.

Re:

[August_zero (654282)]

The terrible truth is, that after the data was lost, they were not sure how much vacation time anyone still had but they were pretty sure he had a lot of it so he was probably burned.

That will teach him next time.

Re:

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

Why not take a weeks vacation from the guy who is responsible for the procedures?

They took the vacation time from the team leader of the person who lost the data. He may well be the person who writes the procedures. I know that I do in my team, and I have a mix of interns and experienced staff. Jobs with a heavy security implication I will give to the more experienced workers.

Re:The guy's Union Boss says...

[Dragonslicer (991472)]

Looks like the Union is staffing IT security now.

Who was doing it before, the Confederacy?