Just the other day my wife and I were conversing over dinner about identity theft. She expressed that she did not understand why organizations don't take greater care with their employee's information. She went on to tell me that that she had received a misdirected fax that contained the names, and social security numbers for an entire family. She showed me the fax, and sure enough, an HR employee was faxing to their insurance carrier, health insurance enrollment information for one of their employees. The fax contained the names, social security numbers, and birthdays of each member of the family, along with list of health related questions. The employee must have dialed the wrong fax number, as it ended up coming to my wife's fax machine.
My wife stated that she could not believe that with today's technology, that an organization would be so careless. I told her it was a mistake, and not intential. She asked me to remember how I felt when someone at a restaurant took my debit card information and charged over $500 worth of merchandise, all because the debit card information was printed on the receipt. I had to admit,...
I was very angry, and felt that it was the restaraunts responsibility to protect my information.
She was right, a simple mistake like this could have left this family's credit a mess, caused them to have to jump through tons of hurdles, and cost this organization an employee. The fall out from this simple mistake could have been huge.
I told my wife that she was correct. That there is technology that would have prevented this situation. I stated that there are a number of reasons that could have lead to why this organization was faxing enrollment information, but it still is a situation that an employer shouldn't put their employees in.
Identity theft is a very serious situation. Once you realize all the steps that you have to go through once a person obtains your personal indentification information you fully appreciate why it is important to find other ways to get employee data to your TPA or insurance vendors outside of using the fax machine. Take it from someone who has been there.
If you are working with vendors today that have you faxing personal identification information to them I would recommend the following:
- Contact the vendor to see if they have a website that you can key this information directly into.
- Consider automating your enrollment processes and providing HIPPA compliant feeds to your carriers.
- Contract with a vendor, such as ADP, to transmit enrollment information to your carriers.
In the end my wife an I shredded the information to prevent anyone from taking it out of trash.
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