Portland-area Veterans Affairs officials spent the weekend calling hundreds of local veterans to see if they have their new identification cards.
Veterans use the ID cards to check in for VA appointments at local sites, including the Vancouver campus of the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Those cards had been mailed to 601 veterans between Jan. 1 and Jan. 27, but some were returned to the VA medical center because of inaccurate mailing addresses.
On Jan. 31, officials learned that most of those returned cards were missing from the hospital’s enrollment office.
Over the weekend, the VA called — or tried to call — all 601 of the vets on the January mailing list, spokesman Mike McAleer said Monday afternoon.
After tallying the phone calls, “339 said they’ve received their cards,” McAleer said. “We’re still waiting to get call-backs from 190 people. We haven’t been able to reach 42, for a combination of reasons.
“We have a lot of homeless veterans” who can be hard to contact, McAleer added.
A few of the returned ID cards are still in the VA office.
To protect sensitive personal information, the front of the ID card displays only the veteran’s name, photograph and special eligibility indicators — military service-connected disability, a Purple Heart award or former POW status.
Although the Social Security number and date of birth do not appear on the card, the information encoded in a bar code and magnetic strip on the back of the card can be revealed by some scanners, McAleer said.
To protect them from potential identify theft, the Portland VA Medical Center is trying to notify those veterans who may be affected by the security breach. They include veterans whose cards were mailed by the facility but did not receive them, and veterans who recently requested a replacement card but moved before receiving it.
Arrangements have been made to help protect the identities and credit information of the affected veterans at no cost for one year.
Veterans who believe they may be affected should call Phillip Cauthers, privacy officer at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, at 503-220-8262, ext. 56480, or Phillip.cauthers@va.gov. They can learn whether their IDs are among the missing cards, and can get help in enrolling in free credit protection services.
There is no indication that the personal information has been misused or stolen. The medical center is working to prevent similar security breaches.
One precaution, according to the VA, is to request a free credit report from one or more of the three national credit bureaus by calling 877-322-8228. Placing a “fraud alert” on one’s credit report is another protective measure, said the news release.
Information about these and other protections is available from the Federal Trade Commission at 877-438-4338 or http://ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft.
