A preliminary report on how forms containing confidential personal information came to be found in dumpsters behind some Monroe County offices found two problems with how the documents were handled.
County Clerk Adam Bello says most of the errant forms have been traced back to a single employee of the County Clerk’s Office, although some were thrown away in public trash cans.
Bello says his investigation found most documents taken from citizens at county Auto License Bureaus go direct to the DMV in Albany. But some paperwork, particularly involving paperless transactions, is given back to the customer. Some people then threw those forms in the public trash bins which weren’t shredded.
Bello says they’ve plugged that leak by shredding all trash and placing public “shred” barrels on the customer side of the counters.
The second issue: at the Henrietta office, an employee was found to be following an outdated policy on shredding sensitive documents, and a new custodian who didn’t know the difference picked up bags of documents to be shredded along with the trash and threw them out. The clerk’s office held an investigatory hearing with those employees today (Wed).
Bello says they only learned this today, and are still working out corrective action. He says the employee had been trained by a supervisor who has since retired and had not learned the new policies.