Rob Shaw and Lindsay Kines report:
Mistakes, missed opportunities and bureaucratic bungling led more than two dozen officials to botch the B.C. government’s response to a major privacy breach, according to a scathing internal review released yesterday.
The investigation found supervisors in four provincial ministries used poor judgment and failed to alert the right people to handle the breach.
But nobody will be fired, because the failure was so widespread across so many officials that it cannot be pinned on one person, concluded the review.
“The judgment exercised in the many decisions made as events unfolded fell short of the due diligence that is expected of the public service,” said Allan Seckel, B.C.’s deputy minister to the premier and head of the public service.
The government report follows a series of Times Colonist stories last year that revealed the personal data of 1,400 income-assistance clients was found in the Victoria home of Richard Ernest Wainwright, a supervisor in the youth and special-needs office of the Ministry of Children and Family Development.