Feb 6, 2021

PII Failure In Charlotte

     From WCNC:

A failure by Social Security Administration employees in Charlotte resulted in the wrong people receiving original copies of others' Social Security cards, passports, birth certificates and other private documents.

"I'm just shocked and really disappointed in the Social Security Administration," said Brandi Soles, whose records were among those compromised. "This isn't an incident that you have when you go and place an order at Wendy's and they forget your fries or they give you somebody else's order. These are personal life documents, originals, that you would expect the Social Security office to handle with care and to make sure that they send them back to the right persons, and that did not happen."

Conversations with several people in Charlotte revealed at least four people were impacted by the mistake. An SSA spokesperson wouldn't reveal how many others were affected.

"Social Security takes its responsibility to protect the information it maintains seriously," SSA Regional Communications Director Patti Patterson said. "Due to employee error some information was mailed to incorrect individuals. We are working to contact these people and secure the information." ...

 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately mistakes happen, even when mgmt is doing the work. If like most offices, the workload with mail is very heavy. Not sure what happened here but most likely someone just put the documents in the wrong envelopes for some people.
I doubt it's a matter of not caring. Mailing back 50 sets of documents a day for close to a year and somewhere in the country someone screwed up.

Anonymous said...

I have never ever seen the wrong evidence faxed into the electronic file by a rep, never ever ever.

little monkey said...

Yeah, but the Agency breached PII on literally thousands of Greensboro claimants in the Bolton v. SSA case, and a lot of that PII is still on PACER. SSA has done almost nothing about that. I repeatedly reported it to the IG and got no response.