Thrift Store Purchase Yields Confidential Files Series Of Missteps Dropped Sensitive Documents Into Woman’S Lap

Hundreds of confidential files on people on public assistance are sitting in a woman’s pickup because a thrift store sold them to her.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said she bought two file cabinets two weeks ago at the St.

Vincent de Paul Society thrift store.

One of the cabinets was locked; the other wasn’t. Both were full of files.

Earl Koester, a St. Vincent’s employee, emptied the unlocked file cabinet and offered to break the lock off the other one.

The woman, not wanting a cabinet with a broken lock, said she’d dump the files later.

Four burly employees loaded the full five-drawer cabinet into the woman’s pickup. She then went home, had a key made and opened up the cabinet.

What she found inside has her hopping mad.

The cabinet was full of 1996 energy assistance files formerly maintained by the North Idaho Community Action Agency, which is now bankrupt.

The energy assistance program is for low-income residents who apply for help with their utility bills in times of need.

The files contain a wealth of sensitive personal information. Social security numbers, birthdates, income levels, health records - it’s all in there.

The information is a credit card fraud’s dream.

Thank goodness, the woman says, she’s not a fraud. In fact, she used to work for the state Department of Health and Welfare, which funded the NICAA, and she considers the misplaced files a severe violation of privacy.

When she worked for Health and Welfare, all old files were shredded and burned.

Here’s how the files got to the thrift store: When the NICAA went bankrupt in 1997, the state came in and seized everything in the agency’s office and stored it in a warehouse. The services NICAA offered were shifted to other agencies, such as the Lewiston Community Action Agency and St. Vincent de Paul’s.

St. Vincent’s was to administer the senior citizens housing projects in Post Falls, Clark Fork, Tensed and Plummer, as well as a child-care nutrition program.

The Lewiston CAA was to take over the food bank and the energy assistance program.

During the transition, says St. Vincent’s Director Lynn Peterson, both agencies were swamped with stuff, and somehow, St. Vincent’s got the file cabinets.

“When CAA first took over, we called them and called them and called them to come get that stuff,” Peterson said. “They were locked cabinets and we didn’t have keys.”

But the Lewiston agency never picked them up, Peterson said, so the cabinets sat in a warehouse for years.

Finally, Peterson told Koester to clear some stuff out of the St. Vincent’s warehouse. But she made sure to point out the cabinets, she said.

“I told him, `That’s information, Earl, you can’t sell them,”’ Peterson said.

Koester said he had no idea what was in those files and didn’t take a peep at them - he just hauled the first batch off to the county landfill.

“I’m not going to get in trouble for this, am I?” he wondered Wednesday. When asked for his last name, he said, “I’m going to take the Fifth on that one.”

But it’s not Koester’s fault that the files were stranded. It’s the Lewiston CAA’s, said Ross Mason, a Boise spokesman for Health and Welfare.

CAA Director Paul Donnolo claimed he’d never received any phone calls from Peterson or St. Vincent’s.

“I have no idea where those files came from, nor can I tell you how they got there,” Donnolo said. “I’m sure if they called and said, `We’ve got files here,’ we would have come and gotten them.”

But that’s not good enough, Mason said.

“They have a responsibility for those files,” Mason said. “If they take over the program, they have to take over those files.”

Donnolo insisted that when the Lewiston CAA took over, it was only on a temporary basis at first, as a favor. When asked if he pursued getting NICAA’s files, he hung up on a reporter.

Three questions remain:

Who would have been accountable if the files had wound up in the wrong hands?

What’s going to happen to the files?

What’s going to happen to Koester?

Mason couldn’t answer the first question definitively, but he did say that federal law requires that the owner of such files maintain confidentiality.

The woman who has the files says she’s going to burn them, because she doesn’t trust them in the hands of state agencies.

Koester, his boss promises, won’t get fired. But he’ll definitely get an earful.