A computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account worth $38 billion. Gone. Vanished. Disappeared.
Just to be doubly sure, he reformatted the backup drive as well.
Authorities looked up their third line of defense - backup tapes. Mother of holy cows, they were unreadable.
“Nobody panicked, but we instantly went into planning for the worst-case scenario,” said Permanent Fund Dividend Division Director Amy Skow. As the best brains in the business, including consultants from Microsoft and Dell, went into emergency mode over the next few days, and slogged to retrieve the data, it soon became obvious that the worst-case scenario was, indeed, the last recourse.
The only backup was the paperwork itself — stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.
“We had to bring that paper back to the scanning room, and send it through again, and quality control it, and then you have to have a way to link that paper to that person’s file,” Skow said.
The division staff, and about 70 people working overtime and weekends re-entered all the lost data in less than two months.
“They were just ready, willing and able to chip in and, in fact, we needed all of them to chip in to get all the paperwork rescanned in a timely manner so that we could meet our obligations to the public,” Skow said.
And last November, the department did just that. A majority of the estimated 600,000 payments for last year’s individual dividends went out on schedule.
The “fatal error” cost the the department more than $200,000.
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