Hon Gerry Brownlee
Minister Responsible for the Earthquake Commission

28 March 2013 Media Statement

EQC IT systems frozen pending complete review

Minister Responsible for the Earthquake Commission Gerry Brownlee has expressed his deep distress and concern at revelations in Parliament today about a further privacy breach of EQC’s system.

“We have been able to establish that a spreadsheet containing about 2200 names and information relating to stopped cheques, worth about $23 million, was inappropriately emailed to a member of the public.

“The recipient took the appropriate actions and advised EQC they had received the information in error through EQC’s online complaints process about a month ago.

“It would appear that email was either not seen by EQC or not acted upon.

“This is a completely unacceptable situation, but may be as a result of IT system problems,” Mr Brownlee said.

Today’s news of a further privacy breach follows an incident last week where details involving about 83,000 claims were emailed to an external party.

The Government has taken three steps, effective today:

1. Required EQC to immediately shut down all external email systems – there will be no emails going into the organisation and none will be sent out.

2. Required EQC to immediately shut down all business-to-business systems and data exchanges as well as access into EQC systems by external parties.

3. Asked the Government’s Chief Information Officer Colin MacDonald to investigate and oversee the solutions for issues relating to information management within EQC.

“Mr MacDonald will develop a priority work programme to resolve and manage the issues with EQC’s information systems and bring its processes and procedures up to standard.

“I have asked for this investigation to be completed as quickly as possible to enable a resumption of claims processing and apologise for the delay this will cause.

“We hope some systems may come back into operation progressively in the days ahead, depending on the depth and extent of the issues found.

“I think this is a timely opportunity to draw breath after what has been a very rapid growth for EQC and ensure the privacy New Zealanders have the right to expect from any agency holding private information is offered to them by EQC.”

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