Town manager: Grifton software update cause of ‘data leak'

A number of Grifton residents had personal information printed in their utility bill’s address line due to accounting software issues, the town said.

Staff announced Monday they were “aware of the data leak on some accounts,” and assured residents that administration was at work to address the situation. The post did not offer specifics.

Town Manager Oryan Lowry said Tuesday that on some accounts with two applicants, the second applicant’s Social Security number was instead printed in the bill’s address line. Those bills were sent out about two weeks ago he said.

“It wasn’t necessarily a data leak,” Lowry said. “We weren’t hacked or anything.”

The problem occurred when staff was transferring data from old software to some new municipal accounting software, he said. In some cases where an account had two applicants, say a husband and a wife, the new software pulled the secondary person’s Social Security number into address fields.

Lowry said the town found 73 out of about 1,200 applicants were affected by the error. A customer notified a member of ddthe error on Saturday morning.

“We identified all the accounts and changed that immediately, first thing yesterday morning,” Lowry said. “Moving forward it’s not going to happen again.”

Lowry said all of the bills with a Social Security number printed in the address line were sent to customers themselves.

“We didn’t put it out there, so to speak, for people to see, it was sent to actual applicants,” Lowry said.