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..

[Anonymous Coward]

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

$3 million?

[Palpitations]

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.

Re:Wrong punishment

[Durrok]

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:A week?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that the next time some Western European slags off the Yanks within earshot. They paid for the reconstruction of most of the Western European economies after WWII, and footed the bill for keeping the Soviets out during the Cold War.

I'm not going to criticise the Americans for doing that, but at the same time don't tell me that there wasn't a very large element of self-interest there. Are you seriously suggesting that the Americans would have been happy with a Soviet-dominated Western Europe? Would they heck.

And it's been argued that much of America's post-war prosperity was due to the rebuilding of- and trading with- rebuilt economies. Had Europe fallen into economic disrepair, that certainly would have made it more likely to fall under Soviet influence, and again, become a threat to the US.

So we both won in this case. I think America's actions in the post-war era were as much enlightened self-interest as altruism, and nothing wrong with that- just don't get too sanctimonious about it.

As for "'keeping the world safe from insert dictator/regime/dogma here'" in a modern context, were you thinking of the war in Iraq?

Re:A week?

[caluml]

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]

Re:A week?

[evilviper]

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:Is that all they are going to do?

[HeWhoMustNotBeNamed]

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.

But

[KKlaus]

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:Is that all they are going to do?

[buckeyeguy]

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:I received the "We lost your data" letter ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I recieved one of those lovely "We lost your data" letters ... 2 months after the incident. So, as one of the individuals who was personally impacted by this, I'd like to say a few things:

Did it leave a bruise? Did it break the skin? Did you need medical attention?

What actually hit you? Was it the letter? Did someone throw one of the tapes at you?

Or have the circumstances that resulted from this theft somehow wedged you in between two solid objects?

I am most curious as to how this theft resulted in you being stricken by or wedged by a solid object.