Highways ministry rapped for losing files on workers

Saskatchewan’s information and privacy commissioner slammed the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure’s investigation and report following a breach involving a missing box of employee records, calling both “inadequate.”

The ministry discovered that the box containing records for 19 inactive employees was missing from the Kindersley office in September 2016 after the provincial auditor’s office requested copies of time card records. Staff searched for the box but couldn’t locate it.

The information contained in the records includes classification reviews, leaves of absence, long-term disability claims, sick

notes and documents related to disciplinary action.

The employees’ employment end dates ranged between May 2010 and November 2015.

In his report following the OIPC’s investigation into the breach, privacy commissioner Ronald Kruzeniski found the ministry failed to meet its duty under the Health Information and Protection Act (HIPA) — since the records contained health-related information — nor did it meet its duty to have retention and destruction schedules for such information.

He ordered the ministry to notify the 19 affected people in writing and to further investigate the possibility of the records “being inappropriately taken” from the Kindersley office.

On Tuesday, ministry spokesman Paul Spasoff said the ministry will not reopen its investigation into the missing records at this time.

“We’ve had interviews with staff and we’re confident that the records in question were inadvertently destroyed, because there were some records that were destroyed and we believe these ones were with them. And we provided the commissioner with a copy of the certificate of destruction indicating that the records were shredded,” he said.

According to the OIPC report, staff at the ministry’s Kindersley district office believed the office had been accessed after hours, and a week after the records were discovered to be missing, the locks to the rear and front doors were changed and a new locking file cabinet was ordered. The ministry then planned to inform the employees and to hire a private investigator to look into the breach, the report states.

However, the ministry later halted its plan to hire a professional investigator and did not proceed with the investigation after it came to light that staff at the office had been involved in a records “cleanup,” according to the report. One hundred boxes were set aside to be shredded — no record was made identifying which ones — and 49 of them were destroyed by a private shredding company in June 2016, it states. The ministry did not inform the 19 people whose records were in the missing box, it notes.

Kruzeniski concluded the ministry could not conclusively determine if the 19 employees’ records had been destroyed because there no inventory was kept to track which records were destroyed.

“I am concerned that the ministry immediately accepted that the employee records were shredded, rather than continuing to investigate the inappropriate removal of the records from the Kindersley District Office. Lacking further evidence — such as an index of records outlining what was in fact was destroyed — it would be impossible for the ministry to come to this conclusion with certainty,” Kruzeniski wrote.

While Spasoff said the ministry is not suggesting the commissioner was wrong, but it “certainly” does not believe there was a breach of privacy.

“If anything, we believe it was a breach of records management, and we fully acknowledge that we didn’t meet our requirements under the Archives and Public Records Management Act,” he said.

The ministry is attributing the missing files to processes not being in place and staff not following records management protocols. It has made changes provincewide to how files are secured and managed since the Kindersley incident, Spasoff said.

He said the ministry is now in the process of putting together a letter to inform the 19 affected people about the missing files.

There were some records that were destroyed and we believe these ones were with them.