Katy ISD responds to credit breach
The Katy Independent School District has retained a credit monitoring program to protect the personal information of nearly 12,000 current and formal employees after a district portable flash drive containing employee names, birth dates, mailing addresses and Social Security numbers was misplaced by an IRS agent during a random audit on Aug. 5.
District officials said the personal information of 11,658 current and formal Katy ISD employees was placed at risk.
The district sent emails and letters from Superintendent Alton Frailey to the present and past employees saying the potential breach includes employees who received a paycheck or made a contribution to a voluntary 457(b) or 403(b) retirement plan during the 2013 calendar year.
Monitoring program
The district has retained iLock360, a credit monitoring program, to protect individual employees’ personal information from fraudulent use at no cost to the affected past and present employees for the next three years, Frailey wrote.
“Based on the information currently available to us, we do not believe that the flash drive was deliberately stolen by anyone or involves a third party,” Frailey said, according to a copy of the letter provided by former KISD employee Diane Wilson. “We take this matter very seriously and will do whatever it takes to protect your personal information.”
The company has begun contacting current and past employees to set up accounts, and they’ll receive emails from iLock360 if something changes with their credit or the company finds something worrisome.
The letter also says the district is in the process of notifying the three U.S. credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian and Trans-Union — about the issue.
“It’s upsetting to me, because who knows what can happen down the line?” said Wilson, who taught at Wolfe Elementary until she retired last year after 28 years with the district. “Now I have to keep a close outlook on my information so that there is no identity theft. If an IRS guy is standing there, there should have been some kind of supervision with that disk laying around. My feeling is, are there going to be any reprimands for this?”
IRS involvement
As of Monday, Wilson said that the district had not made further contact with her or any district teachers she knows since receiving the letter. She added that the IRS contacted her on Saturday and also urged her to contact the three credit bureaus to protect her credit.
“Katy ISD will be following the IRS’s investigation of this incident very closely,” said a written statement from the district on Monday. “The District will also seek recovery costs from the IRS for the credit monitoring services it has retained for its employees due to this immense mishap resulting from its agent having lost the employee data.”