Reaction Of Sen. Patrick Leahy
To IRS’s $20 Million Contract Award
To ChoicePoint
Tuesday, June 28, 2005

[Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and, with Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), has drafted a comprehensive data privacy bill that they will soon introduce.

(Click here for summary of the draft bill:  http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200506/062305b.html)

ChoicePoint’s recent data breach was examined during recent Judiciary Committee hearings requested by Leahy.  The IRS is awarding a $20 million data processing contract to ChoicePoint.]

“It is especially galling right now to be rewarding firms that have been so careless with the public’s confidential information.  The dust has not yet settled and the investigations are incomplete on ChoicePoint’s lax security practices.  We should at least take a pause before rewarding such missteps with even more government contracts.  We need to closely examine these contracts and the extent to which they include appropriate provisions to protect security and privacy, and sufficient penalties to sanction failures.  This contract again highlights the need for the legislation that Senator Specter and I have drafted, which would place privacy and security front and center in evaluating whether data brokers can be trusted with government contracts that involve sensitive information about the American people.”

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