An article in the "Metro" Section of today's Washington Post iterated the importance, should there be any debate, of the existence of a well-maintained and administered property management system to account for property from the "cradle to the grave", or procurement to disposal. Two servers belonging to the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue, possibly containing personally identifiable information (PII) of D.C. taxpayers, were found in a trash compactor in northwest D.C. It was only a few months ago that this same District office was the focus of the largest corruption scandal in the city, which resulted in the arrests of 10 people for involvement in an alleged embezzlement of over $20 million in property tax refunds.
The million-dollar question now is whether or not those servers were "purposely" disposed of in an incorrect manner (local government offices commonly do not trash large pieces of IT equipment in neighborhood dumpsters) in an effort to hide any information that might be incriminating to those involved in the corruption scandal. Even if that is found not to be the case, this event identifies some serious issues around the accountability for property in government offices. Authorities will need to find out who had access to these servers, what sort of equipment was connected to them, and ultimately, who retained accountability for them. And although a representative from the District's CFO's office maintains that office policy is to wipe confidential data from any drives before giving the machines to another D.C. agency or public school or disposing of them, he can't say whether or not that occurred with these servers, or why their tax office labels were not removed before disposal. The Office of Tax and Revenue may well be able to provide an explanation for the appearance of these items in a trash repository, but it will also need to explain why they seem to have disappeared from the office in a manner that is clearly not in line with standard operating procedures, assuming those procedures actually do exist, and are tightly monitored by property management personnel.
The million-dollar question now is whether or not those servers were "purposely" disposed of in an incorrect manner (local government offices commonly do not trash large pieces of IT equipment in neighborhood dumpsters) in an effort to hide any information that might be incriminating to those involved in the corruption scandal. Even if that is found not to be the case, this event identifies some serious issues around the accountability for property in government offices. Authorities will need to find out who had access to these servers, what sort of equipment was connected to them, and ultimately, who retained accountability for them. And although a representative from the District's CFO's office maintains that office policy is to wipe confidential data from any drives before giving the machines to another D.C. agency or public school or disposing of them, he can't say whether or not that occurred with these servers, or why their tax office labels were not removed before disposal. The Office of Tax and Revenue may well be able to provide an explanation for the appearance of these items in a trash repository, but it will also need to explain why they seem to have disappeared from the office in a manner that is clearly not in line with standard operating procedures, assuming those procedures actually do exist, and are tightly monitored by property management personnel.
