Porker of the Week: The Strickland Administration

posted June 25, 2007

COLUMBUS – Eye on the Statehouse has named the Strickland Administration the Porker of the Week for the costs associated with its sloppy handling of sensitive information.  Over the past few weeks, Governor Ted Strickland has provided almost daily disclosures of stolen data containing social security numbers, health records and banking information.

Today, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation added to the growing list of Ohioans impacted by announcing that a laptop computer with confidential medical information was stolen last month.

In total, over 500,000 Ohioans have been put at risk for identity theft or forfeited their right to medical privacy. Taxpayers will likely spend over a million dollars to clean up the mess.

Most troubling is that the Strickland Administration knew for at least six months that the data protection procedures it inherited from the Taft Administration were inadequate.

A January report to Governor Strickland’s transition team stated, “Ohio’s lack of a robust, unified privacy/security capacity lays it open to the type of data spills and breaches that have been plaguing the government and the corporate sectors in increasing numbers over the past few years.”

Ironically, the report’s author, Sol Bermann, was hired as Ohio’s first chief privacy officer in March.

With a projected $167 million shortfall for the next state budget, this is not the time to be forced into spending an extra million dollars because of improper data safeguards. This is especially true when the dangers were known well in advance.

For putting nearly 500,000 Ohioans at risk and forcing the expenditure of scarce state resources, the Strickland Administration is this week’s Porker of the Week.

The full text of the Porker of the Week is available at eyeonthestatehouse.org.

Eye on the Statehouse is a project of the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions.  The Web-based initiative monitors and reports on the current state budget approval process.

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For more information, contact Carlo LoParo at (614) 224-4422.