No Quality Assurance

Great.

Sean Kenny, vice president of global health care for EDS Corp., of Plano, Texas, took questions from reporters in Madison in an effort to reassure Wisconsin residents that the glitch was an isolated mistake, not a systemic problem.

Karen Timberlake, the deputy secretary of the state Department of Health and Family Services, said EDS was entirely responsible for quality control.

“The fact of the matter is they had an obligation to put out this mailing accurately,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing that it’s happened once, but in 30 years of being our vendor . . . this has never happened before.”

Kenny said the case number - a participant’s Social Security number plus a zero, with no spaces or hyphens - was inadvertently put on the address label by the EDS employee who prepared it. EDS provided the data to a subcontractor, A.M. Mailing Services, which mailed the information.

The state and EDS have said A.M. Mailing bears no responsibility for the incident.

A quality-control worker checks to be sure the addresses are printed in the proper place, but does not check for errors such as the inappropriate disclosure of information, Kenny said. The state does not do an independent check of mailings before they are sent.

But the yet unanswered question is… why did EDS have the social security numbers in the first place?

1. EDS has the SS#’s because they are used as the identifier of Medicaid recipients.

   Posted by on January 13, 2008 at 1059 hrs




2. Sean Kenny, vice president of global health care for EDS Corp., of Plano, Texas, took questions from reporters in Madison in an effort to reassure Wisconsin residents that the glitch was an isolated mistake, not a systemic problem.

   This company, Owen, Bush, the Cowboys…

   Nothing good ever comes out of Texas does it?

   Posted by on January 13, 2008 at 1417 hrs




3. It gets worse for you, capper.  EDS is the company that Ross Perot founded.  I used to drive past their headquarters every day on the way to work.

   Posted by Owen on January 13, 2008 at 1434 hrs




4. Now, I understand that giant sucking sound.  (Ooh, a twofer, Ross Perot and the Cowboys, both sucking bad)

   Posted by on January 13, 2008 at 2009 hrs




5. Looks like Wisconsin has only prohibited private institutions of higher learning from using a SSN as the account ID or incorporated into the ID.  It’s ludicrous that the state itself can still use it as needed.
   

   Wisconsin (2003) Wis. Stat. § 36.32 Prohibits private institutions of higher education from assigning to any student an identification number that is identical to or incorporates the student’s SSN.

   Posted by on January 13, 2008 at 2244 hrs




6. And people chided me and my son for using form MV3415 and its successor in order to refuse to give our SSN’s to the DMV.

   A core security principle (least privilege) can be summed up by: You cannot abuse what you do not have. Relative to my SSN, the security policies of the DMV are irrelevant.  The DMV does not have the information to “lose”.

   Breaches and leaks like this will only become more common under Sennsenbrenner’s abomination, “Real” ID.  Unfortunately, the consequences of these future breaches be more severe and will be in direct proportion to the degree your government-controlled ID is centrallized upon a single number.

   Get the number, get your identity.

   Posted by John Washburn on January 13, 2008 at 2321 hrs




7. Looks like Wisconsin has only prohibited private institutions of higher learning from using a SSN as the account ID or incorporated into the ID.

   The UW System and tech colleges are also prohibited. And as John points out, you are not obligated to give your SSN. For example, foreign students don’t have them.

   I’d lay pretty good odds that EDS has them for purposes of federal reporting.

   Posted by on January 14, 2008 at 0001 hrs




8. No, Jim. EDS had them because Wisconsin chose to use that number in the 1970’s.  It’s the State’s protocol.

   Posted by dad29 on January 14, 2008 at 0758 hrs