UP sued over loss of SSNs...

Union Pacific Sued on Social Security Numbers

The theft of a company-owned computer has resulted in a class-action lawsuit against Union Pacific Railroad Co. over the use of Social Security numbers to identify employees.
The lawsuit was filed Friday in Pottawattamie County District Court by nine UP employees on behalf of a class that could include 30,000 members, according to the lawsuit.
The nine plaintiffs are William Price of Omaha; William Platt of Mitchell, Nebraska; Jerry Eubank of Cheyenne, Wyoming; George Owen of Independence, Missouri; Chris Nelson of Missouri Valley, Iowa; David Blackmore of Kansas City, Missouri; Jeffrey Klapprodt of Boone, Iowa; Chris Tucker of Abilene, Kansas; and Jacob Moore of Edwardsville, Kansas.
Company attorneys had not yet seen the lawsuit and had no comment, a UP spokesman said Monday.
The company said in May that police were investigating the theft of a computer with the names and Social Security numbers of 30,000 active and retired UP Corp. employees from a human resources employee. The theft occurred Apr29.
The company notified the 30,000 people affected, paid for their credit monitoring for a year and encouraged them to put fraud alerts on their current accounts, a spokeswoman said in May. The employee violated company policy by transferring work files to a private computer to work on at home, and the private computer was stolen, the spokeswoman said.
One of the plaintiffs said employees continue to be put at risk every day because Social Security numbers are used to access routine information at work.
"We're concerned about the possibility of identity theft, and UP only wanted to offer one year of fraud protection," said William Platt.
Platt said that even to reach such information as the hours of his next work shift, which he sometimes accesses by cell phone, he must use his Social Security number, even though he also has another employee identity number.
"They should have taken steps to eliminate the use of Social Security numbers throughout the system. They place us at risk every day by using Social Security numbers for everything we do inside the company."
Among seven causes of action, the lawsuit asserts that UP acted negligently by failing to protect employees' Social Security numbers, by using them for purposes other than tax reporting, and by failing to use other employee-identifying numbers.
The lawsuit also claims UP caused emotional distress for the plaintiffs in failing to protect their Social Security numbers and that the failure is "so outrageous in character and so extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency and is to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized community." The plaintiffs requested an unstated amount of punitive damages and a jury trial. Their attorneys are Ryan Sewell of Council Bluffs and Robert E. O'Connor Jr. of Omaha. - Stacie Hamel, The Omaha World-Herald