Each Friday, Eye on the Statehouse announces its “Porker of the Week.” It’s our way of calling attention to a particularly big or wasteful spender.

This week’s Porker is the Strickland Administration. Over the past two weeks, Governor Ted Strickland has disclosed that social security numbers of every single state worker and many Ohioans who had financial dealings with the state were on a computer tape stolen from an intern’s car. In total, nearly 500,000 Ohioans have been put at risk for identity theft. And the state will likely spend over a million dollars to provide these individuals with identity theft protection.

The Columbus Dispatch reported today that the Strickland Administration has known for at least six months that Ohio lacks adequate safeguards needed to protect the identities of Ohioans.

Sol Bermann, in a report for the Governor’s transition team in January, concluded, “Ohio’s lack of a robust, unified privacy/security capacity lays it open to the type of data spills and breaches that have been plaguing the government and the corporate sectors in increasing numbers over the past few years.”

Ironically, Bermann was hired as Ohio’s first chief privacy officer in March.

With a projected $167 million shortfall for the next state budget, this is not the time to be forced into spending an extra million dollars because of improper identity safeguards. This is especially true when the dangers were well known in advance.

On the whole, this is just another reminder of government inefficiency and bureaucratic malaise.

For putting nearly 500,000 Ohioans at risk and forcing the expenditure of scarce state resources, the Strickland Administration is this week’s Porker of the Week.

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