With the theft of data from the VA that contained the personal information of 26.5 million veterans you may be wondering what the VA is doing to protect your private information. The information that was stolen was quickly recovered and it is believed that none of the veteran’s information has been accessed or tampered with, but there is still the possibility that confidential information from the VA could be used to commit fraudulent acts in the future.

The VA is cautious with all of their veteran’s personal information and they take steps in order to avoid the theft of any information, and in the case information is stolen they take further steps to protect the affected veterans from any damage that might be caused by this information breech. Some of the actions the VA takes to keep your personal information safe from fraud include:

• Informing the supervisors at the VA of their personal information protection policies. This includes their responsibilities to protect personal information of veterans and their families.
• The VA is required to protect Federal information and to only use this information for authorized activities and in locations that are authorized by the VA.
• For supervisors, they need to know exactly what information their employees and contractors have access to and when and where this information is used for what purpose. They also need to record who was given exactly what information when, why, and through what means. For instance a supervisor must write down the allowable reason for information disclosure, exactly what information was disclosed to who, and by what means was the information shared, i.e. electronically or paper files?
• VA employees are all required to go through General Privacy Training and VA Cyber Security Awareness Training once every year. Once the training is complete the employees are required to sign a Statement of Commitment and Understanding which proves that the employees fully understand their responsibilities to protect and safeguard confidential information of the veterans and their families.
• Some senior leaders in the VA have also been assembled into a task force to examine the inner workings of the VA’s information security and look for any flaws or weaknesses. This way the VA can better protect the information of veterans and their families.
• The VA is hiring a company to perform a data breach analysis to make sure that no information is being used against any veteran who was vulnerable due to the recent theft of information. The data breach analysis will allow the VA to make sure that the information is not being fraudulently used so that they can reassure veterans and their families that their personal information is still safe and confidential.

It is important to the VA to continue to hold the confidence of veterans who need to disclose their personal information in order to participate in VA benefit programs. The VA understands their responsibility to keep all information confidential for veterans and their families and wants to assure veterans that this information theft took place as a result of a VA employee violating the rules and taking federal property home without authorization from the VA.

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