CHARLES TOWN - The fallout continued Thursday following an error that officials said resulted in the placement of Social Security numbers, birth dates and other personal information onto a county Web site.
Late last week, Jefferson County Clerk Jennifer Maghan said she unveiled a new online search tool that enabled residents and business professionals to access nearly 1.6 million documents that are stored in her office via their home computers.
Maghan said she received a number of compliments about the new program after it debuted, but learned within a matter of days that the deeds and some of the other documents that the service contained featured residents' Social Security numbers and other personal information.
"It's on these documents, where a Social Security number had no business being there," she told county commissioners on Thursday.
The service has since been suspended until all Social Security numbers can be removed from the documents as they appear online, she said. She expects that it could take as long as a month before all the documents can be reviewed and the sensitive information removed.
Maghan told commissioners that she thinks only 211 visitors went to the site before the documents were pulled from public access. After evaluating the IP addresses of those visitors, she said it appears that all of them came from the local area, and that the numbers were not viewed by anyone from outside the region.
Maghan said she received several calls to inform her that the numbers had been posted on the Web. In all instances, she said, residents called because they had spotted their own information on the site.
But resident Ed Burns told commissioners that the mistake was one that could have "long-term consequences."
"It was a really stupid thing to do," he said.
Burns urged the commission to enter into a contract with a credit monitoring agency so that residents would be able to ensure that no one had obtained their Social Security number from the Web site to use it fraudulently.
Jefferson County Sheriff Everett "Ed" Boober also expressed concern about the issue that morning. Boober told commissioners that identity theft is a very real problem, and "we must be very protective" of sensitive information to ensure that no one becomes a victim of such crimes.
Commissioners urged Maghan to try to determine whose documents may have been viewed while the service was posted online. Those individuals should be notified, officials said.
But Maghan noted that even after Social Security numbers are removed from the forms found in the online document search, the numbers will still be part of the public record since they appear on hard copies of documents in her office.
Residents are allowed to come to her office and view records that are stored there, she said. Many property and bank-related documents feature Social Security numbers, she said, adding that her office is forbidden from altering the documents in any way after they have been recorded, making it impossible to ever remove the information from a hard copy of a document.
"From here until eternity," she said, residents' Social Security numbers will be included on documents that are in the County Courthouse, unless residents opt to have the numbers removed before the forms are recorded.
- Staff writer Naomi Smoot can be reached at (304) 725-6581 or nsmoot@journal-news.net