The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general ordered the agency to better protect natural disaster survivors from identity theft.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency shared sensitive data, including personal banking information, of 2.3 million disaster survivors with a housing contractor, putting them at risk of identity theft.
"FEMA is no longer sharing unnecessary data with the contractor and has conducted a detailed review of the contractor’s information system," the agency said in a statement."To date, FEMA has found no indicators to suggest survivor data has been compromised." The contractor received information from FEMA applications to determine who was eligible for the program, but agency provided more personal data than was necessary, according to the report. Some of that included sensitive personally identifiable information, including an applicant's address, financial institution name, electronic funds transfer number, and bank transit number.
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