VICTORIA — More than 1,400 people whose personal information was found by police in the home of a B.C. government supervisor last year should have been notified immediately of the privacy breach not seven months later, a new report said.

B.C. acting privacy commissioner Paul Fraser said the length of time it took to alert income assistance clients was the “most significant failure” in the government’s response.

“It is clear, beyond any doubt, that affected individuals should have been notified within days of the April 7, 2009, discovery,” Fraser wrote in the report. “A seven-month delay in notification meant that any reasonable opportunity for risk mitigation was lost.”

Fraser also found that government officials failed to properly protect clients’ information in the first place. Neither the Ministry of Housing and Social Development nor the Ministry of Children and Family Development had any idea that the supervisor had kept clients’ records at home for months, and sometimes years, without authorization. That should be fixed, Fraser said.

Fraser’s report follows the discovery of records in the Victoria home of Richard Ernest Wainwright, a supervisor in the youth and special-needs office of the children’s ministry.

via Vancouver Sun.

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