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While the recession injured many industries in 2008, health care was one of the few bright spots in the employment picture, growing by 372,000 jobs last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' January 2009 Employment Situation Summary. The large aging population has health care employers in need of qualified workers: stat. Therefore, despite the current economic conditions, health care employers will continue to increase staff in 2009, according to CareerBuilder.com's annual health care hiring forecast, conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive. Close to one-in-five (17 percent) of large health care employers (50 or more employees) plan to increase the number of full-time, permanent employees in 2009, while 67 percent foresee either making no change in the number of employees or are unsure. Sixteen percent plan to decrease the number of employees. "The health care industry continues to boast high demand for qualified workers. Employers are reacting to this need by continuing strong recruiting efforts this year," says Jason Ferrara, vice president of corporate marketing for CareerBuilder.com. "Half of health care employers, the highest among industries we surveyed, have open positions for which they can't find qualified candidates. In response, health care employers will have to adjust their recruitment and retention strategies to find and keep top talent."

Global employers still have trouble finding the right people for open positions, even as candidate resumes pile up amid recession. A global talent crunch has eased slightly, but is set to worsen in coming years because of demographic trends, according to an annual survey by global employment services company Manpower Inc. Worldwide, 30 percent of employers reported trouble filling positions because of the lack of suitable talent, down slightly from 31 percent who said so a year ago, according to Manpower, which polled 39,000 employers in 33 countries. While many more people are looking for work, they often lack the skills, or experience, that employers need.

More likely, a lack of competent recruiting talent.

A typical lost or stolen laptop costs employers $49,246, mostly due to the value of the missing intellectual property or other sensitive data, according to an Intel-commissioned study made public Wednesday. "It is the information age, and employees are carrying more information on their laptops than ever before," according to an analysis done for Intel by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, which studies organizational data-management practices. "With each lost laptop there is the risk that sensitive data about customers, employees and business operations will end up in the wrong hands." The five-month study examined 138 laptop-loss cases suffered over a recent 12-month period by 29 organizations, mostly businesses but also a few government agencies. It said laptops frequently are lost or stolen at airports, conferences and in taxis, rental cars and hotels. About 80 percent of the typical cost - or a little more than $39,000 - was attributed to what the report called a data breach, which can involve everything from hard-to-replace company information to data on individuals. Companies then often incur major expenses to prevent others from misusing the data. Lost intellectual property added nearly $5,000 more to the average cost. The rest of the estimated expense was associated with such things as investigative costs, lost productivity and replacing the laptop. Larry Ponemon, the institute's chairman and Advertisement founder, said he came up with the cost figure based on his discussions with the employers who lost the laptops. When he later shared his findings with the companies and government agencies, he said, some of their executives expressed surprise at the size of the average loss. But he noted that one of the employers thought the amount could have been even higher.

By now, many employees are uncomfortably aware that their every keystroke at work, from email on office computers to text messages on company phones, can be monitored legally by their employers. What employees typically don't expect is for the company to spy on them while on password-protected sites using nonwork computers. But even that privacy could be in jeopardy. A case brewing in federal court in New Jersey pits bosses against two employees who were complaining about their workplace on an invite-only discussion group on MySpace.com, a social-networking site owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. The case tests whether a supervisor who managed to log into the forum -- and then fired employees who badmouthed supervisors and customers there -- had the right to do so. The case has some legal and privacy experts concerned that companies are intruding into areas that their employees had considered off limits. "The question is whether employees have a right to privacy in their non-work-created communications with each other. And I would think the answer is that they do," said Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment expert and partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York. The legal landscape is murky. For the most part, employers don't need a reason to fire nonunion workers. But state laws in California, New York and Connecticut protect employees who engage in lawful, off-duty activities from being fired or disciplined, according to a report prepared by attorneys at the firm Proskauer Rose LLP. While private conversations might be covered under those laws, none of the statutes specifically addresses social networking or blogging. Thus, privacy advocates expect to see more of these legal challenges. In February, three police officers in Harrison, N.Y., were suspended after they allegedly made lewd remarks about the town mayor on a Facebook account. The officers mistakenly thought the remarks were protected with a password, but city officials view

"Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email. But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically. Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else's personal and financial information is easier than ever. "Courts are more inclined to rule based on arguments presented to them that privacy issues need to be carefully considered," said Katharine Parker, a lawyer at Proskauer Rose who specializes in employment issues. In past years, courts showed sympathy for corporations that monitored personal email accounts accessed over corporate computer networks. Generally, judges treated corporate computers, and anything on them, as company property. Now, courts are increasingly taking into account whether employers have explicitly described how email is monitored to their employees."

"The school's policy seems to violate the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), says Susannah Baruch of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. "Most generally," she says, "GINA prohibits health insurers and employers from using your genetic information against you." The law went fully into effect Nov. 21, and it prevents health insurers from collecting genetic information to make decisions about the insurance people get or how much it costs. The law also says an employer can't use it to make decisions about hiring, firing or job promotions. There are a few exceptions. The law doesn't apply to employers with fewer than 15 workers. And while it covers health insurance, it doesn't apply to life or long-term care insurance."

A Swiss insurance worker lost her job after surfing popular social network site Facebook while off sick, her employer said Friday. The woman said she could not work in front of a computer as she needed to lie in the dark but was then seen to be active on Facebook, which insurer Nationale Suisse said in a statement had destroyed its trust in the employee. "This abuse of trust, rather than the activity on Facebook, led to the ending of the work contract," it said. The unnamed woman told the 20 Minuten daily she had been surfing Facebook in bed on her iPhone and accused her employer of spying on her and other employees by sending a mysterious friend request which allows access to personal online activity. Nationale Suisse rejected the accusation of spying and said the employee's Facebook activity had been stumbled across by a colleague in November, before use of the social network site was blocked in the company.

Never mind landing the job. Now people on the lookout for employment have another cause for worry: identity theft. As the joblessness rate soars, scammers are ginning up fake Web sites or posing as recruiters to trick job seekers into giving up sensitive personal information. Corneilus Allison became a potential target after he applied for a position at Aetna (AET) in January, court documents show. In hopes of securing a position at the insurer, he entered required personal information into Aetna's job Web site. In May he received a response-but it wasn't an offer of employment. Aetna instead told him that his personal information, including his Social Security number, might have been compromised. Hackers had found their way into Aetna's job application site, managed by an outside vendor, nabbed e-mail addresses of job seekers, and sent correspondence as if from Aetna asking for additional personal information.

"In light of a spike in identity theft and the frequency with which personal information is stored on portable devices, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) have expanded Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP) to include protocols for securing and disposing of personal information. "Safeguarding personal information is one of the most challenging responsibilities facing an organization, whether such information pertains to employees or customers," said Everett C. Johnson, CPA, chair of AICPA/CICA Privacy Task Force and a past international president of ISACA, a global information technology association. "We've updated the criteria of our privacy principles to minimize the risks to personal information." GAPP offers guidance and best practices on securing portable devices, breach management and ensuring continued effectiveness of privacy controls. The guidance additionally covers disposal and destruction of personal information. The principles are designed for chief privacy officers, executive management, compliance officers, legal counsel, CPAs and CAs offering technology advisory services. "Portable tools such as laptops and memory sticks provide convenience to employees but appropriate measures must be put in place to secure them and the data they contain," said Donald Sheehy, CA.CISA, CIPP/C, associate partner with Deloitte (Canada) and a member of the AICPA/CICA Privacy Task Force. "We must stay abreast of technological advances to assure that proper measures are put into place to defend against any new threats." Created by the AICPA/CICA Privacy Task Force, GAPP is designed to help an organization's management team assess an existing privacy program or address privacy obligations and risks. The principles provide a framework for CPAs and CAs to offer privacy services to their clients and employers, such as advisory services, privacy risk assessments and attestation or

When it comes to online privacy, we all appreciate the risk of publicizing juicy factoids such as incriminating photos or credit card numbers. But few of us realize a subtler threat: In abundance, innocuous, everyday data can divulge sensitive information as well. Some questions shouldn't be asked. Employers, for instance, generally are not allowed to discriminate based on marital status, sexual orientation and so on. But our growing digital footprint is threatening our ability to dodge inappropriate inquiries. Through data mining, employers, insurers, advertisers and others can infer the answers to private questions without even asking. They need two things: a heap of personal data, and the techniques to crunch it. Both are readily available. People generate and share more information than ever before. Besides consciously generated Web content such as blogs, Facebook profiles and YouTube videos, a steady stream of data is exchanged in the background. Companies track our searches, browsing and shopping behavior. Personal electronic devices can silently disclose our location while we post status updates and photos to the Web. All this seems innocent enough - and the more others do it, the safer we all feel. After all, what's one more Twitter update among millions?

To find out more about the survey, I asked Deloitte LLP chairman of the board Sharon Allen to provide some additional context. Given that my only risk-management concern early this week relates to thunderstorms off the coast of South Padre Island, I asked Sharon to step in as a guest blogger today. Here's what she sent me: When I was a high school student growing up in the small farming community of Kimberly, Idaho, little did I know that a song from that time could serve as an anthem for something happening in the workplace today. The Beatles' 1967 classic "Hello Goodbye" is a study in contrasts, as are the current attitudes about social media. Social media has arrived - and with it, employers and employees are singing very different songs about what constitutes appropriate social networking both on and off the job. Recently, I commissioned the third annual Deloitte LLP "Ethics & Workplace" survey. We polled 500 executives and 2,000 employees outside Deloitte. Our survey found that 60 percent of business executives believe they have a right to know how employees portray themselves and their organizations in online social networks. Perhaps because nearly three-fourths of the employees in our poll agreed that the use of social networks makes it easier to damage a company's reputation. However, more than half of employees polled say their social networking pages are not an employer's concern. That belief is especially true among younger workers, with nearly two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-old respondents stating that employers have no business monitoring their online activity.

A majority of business executives believe that they have a right to know what their employees are doing on social-networking sites, but most workers say it's none of their bosses' business, according to a new survey by Deloitte. The survey was conducted in April with about 2,000 U.S. adults. Of the 500 respondents with managerial job titles (vice president, CIO, partner, board member, etc.), 299, or 60%, agreed that businesses have a right to know how employees portray themselves or their companies on sites like Facebook and MySpace. But 53% of employee respondents said their profiles are none of their employers' business, and 61% said that they wouldn't change what they were doing online even if their boss was monitoring their activities. That disagreement, says Sharon Allen, chairman of Deloitte's board and the sponsor of the survey, is one that companies need to address, particularly as these sites have become part of younger workers' lives. "It does, in fact, tee up the challenging debate or discussion that needs to take place to try to resolve both of their concerns," she said. Few businesses are having that conversation, according to the survey, though many executives indicated that it was on their minds. When asked what their company's policy was regarding social-networking use, roughly a quarter (26%) of employees said they knew of specific guidelines as to what they could and couldn't post. Similar numbers said their office didn't have a policy or they didn't know if their company had a policy - 23% and 24%, respectively.

"A federal law designed to prevent employers and health insurers from discriminating against an individual based on their genetic predisposition to disease took effect late last month, signaling a new era where intermingling genetic advances and privacy concerns create new challenges in health care. But left out of the federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, commonly known as GINA, were privacy protections for individuals seeking long-term care, disability and life insurance coverage. Each of those areas was left up to the individual states. At least 10 states regulate the use of genetic information in long-term care insurance. But in California, privacy protections were left to expire by lawmakers in January 2008. Mark Billingsley, spokesman for state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, said in an e-mail that there "appears to be a giant loophole" in California's insurance code regarding long-term care insurance and genetic privacy protections. He said he couldn't identify a single provision in the state code that would preclude a private insurer from requesting such a test for underwriting purposes. "

Heartland Payment Systems, a credit card processor, may have had up to 100 million records exposed to malicious hackers. Payment processors CheckFree and RBS Worldpay, and employment site Monster.com have all reported data breaches in recent months, as have universities and government agencies. Experts at Wharton say that personal data is increasingly a liability for companies, and suggest that part of the solution may be minimizing the customer information these companies keep.

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The Senate and House appear headed for a clash over competing visions of how to protect the privacy of patients' electronic medical records, with the House favoring strict protections advocated by consumer groups while the Senate is poised to endorse more limited safeguards urged by business interests. President Obama has called creation of a nationwide system of electronic medical records fundamental to health-care reform, and both chambers of Congress have included about $20 billion to jump-start the initiative as part of their stimulus bills. But as with much in the stimulus package, it is not just the money but the accompanying provisions that groups are trying to influence. The effort to speed adoption of health information technology has become the focus of an intense lobbying battle fueled by health-care and drug-industry interests that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and tens of millions more on campaign contributions over the past two years, much of it shifting to the Democrats since they took control of Congress. At the heart of the debate is how to strike a balance between protecting patient privacy and expanding the health industry's access to vast and growing databases of information on the health status and medical care of every American. Insurers and providers say the House's proposed protections would hobble efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of health care, but privacy advocates fear that the industry would use the personal data to discriminate against patients in employment and health care as well as to market the information, often through third parties, to generate profits.

The recent U.S. stimulus bill includes $18 billion to catapult the health industry toward the world of electronic health records. This is sure to light a fire under every hungry security vendor to position itself as the essential product or service necessary to achieve HIPAA compliance. It should also motivate healthcare IT professionals to learn where their sensitive data is located and how it flows. To be sure, with federal money allocated through 2014 for the task of modernizing the healthcare industry there will be many consultant and vendor businesses that will thrive on stimulus money. Healthcare is unique in that storage of electronic health records is highly distributed between primary care physicians, specialist doctors, hospitals, and insurance/HMO organizations. Information has to be efficiently shared among these entities with great sensitivity towards patient privacy and legitimate claims processing. Patients want to prevent over zealous employers from performing unauthorized background checks on medical history; claim processors want to prevent paying fraudulent claims arising from targeted patient identity theft. The bill has two provisions which turn this into a tremendously challenging plan, and a daunting task for securing patient data: * Citizens will have the right to monitor and control use of their own health data. This implies a large centralized identity and access control service, or perhaps a federated network of patient registration directories. Authenticated users will be able to reach into the network of health databases audit use of their data and payment history. * Health organizations suffering loss of more than 500 patient records must publicly disclose the breach, starting with postings on the government's Health and Human Services website. This allows related organizations to trace the impact of the breach throughout the healthcare network, but care must be taken not to disclose vulnerabilities in the system to intruders

Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. Using peer-to-peer applications, which computer users download to share files, most commonly music and movies, M. Eric Johnson, director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., was able to access electronic medical records on computers that had the peer-to-peer programs stored on their hard drives. The medical files contained detailed personal data on physical and mental diagnoses, which a hacker could use to not only embarrass a patient but also to commit medical fraud. One of the largest stashes of medical data Johnson discovered during two weeks of research he conducted in January was a database containing two spreadsheets from a hospital he declined to identify. The files contained records on 20,000 patients, which included names, Social Security numbers, insurance carriers and codes for diagnoses. The codes identified by name four patients infected with AIDS, the mental illnesses that 201 others were diagnosed as having and cancer findings for 326 patients. Data also included links to four major hospitals and 355 insurance carriers that provided health coverage to 4,029 employers and 266 doctors.

In Deloitte's sixth annual Global Security Survey, people are the problem. "[P]eople continue to be an organization's greatest asset as well as its greatest worry," Adel Melek, global leader of security and privacy services at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, said in the report. "That has not changed from 2007. What has changed is the environment. The economic meltdown was not at its peak when respondents took this survey. If there was ever an environment more likely to facilitate an organization's people being distracted, nervous, fearful, or disgruntled, this is it. To state that security vigilance is even more important at a time like this is an understatement." On one level, that couldn't be more obvious: It's not as if anyone worries about squirrels hacking servers; security has always been about people. (Robots, the report says, are unlikely to replace the human workforce during the lifetime of anyone reading the report. Finally, some good employment news.) Yet despite the obviousness of the problem, the obvious solution -- complete denial of access -- doesn't work. People use computers and computers are more useful when connected and it just gets worse from there. That may explain why identity and access management remained top of mind for survey respondents. Deloitte's survey, drawn from major financial companies around the globe, focuses on governance, investment, risk, use of security technologies, quality of operations, and privacy. It includes some good news -- external breaches have declined sharply over the past year -- and troublesome news -- fewer companies say they have the commitment and funding to address regulatory compliance. In terms of risk, specifically information systems failure, people are identified as the most significant vulnerability. "Human error is overwhelmingly stated as the greatest weakness this year (86%), followed by technology (a distant 63%)," the report states. It attributes the rising risk to increased adoption of new techno

The federal government has a key role to play in researching and organizing a national response to the problem of medical identity theft, authors of a government-funded study have concluded. Patients, providers, payers and other members of the healthcare community also must join in the effort to combat a problem that is serious, although as yet its scope is not fully known, the report stated. Contractor Booz Allen Hamilton released the report last week. It represents the final phase of the $450,000 study funded last year by the Office of the National Coordinator at HHS. The study consisted of three parts, the first being to review existing knowledge about medical identity theft as well as policies and practices to prevent it. Those findings were included in a research paper on the subject released last October. The second phase involved a public meeting Oct. 15, 2008, the same day the paper was released, to "open a dialogue about medical identity theft within the healthcare industry. The final phase, the 26-page report, includes 31 "potential actions," which are recommendations that could form a national policy on medical identity theft. While medical identity theft "may be categorized as healthcare fraud," according to the report, "there are unique and important distinctions of medical identity theft that need to become more commonly understood to address this issue effectively." One difference, the report authors noted, is that the primary motive behind healthcare fraud "is most often monetary gain, such as when fraudulent providers bill for more expensive services than those rendered. However, medical identity theft tends to be focused on the use of someone else's information to gain goods, services and healthcare." IT could hurt, help Therefore, undetected medical identity theft poses medical risks to its victims, since their medical records may contain inaccurate and potentially harmful information that may cause them not to be con

On Monday two women from Fort Pierce were arrested for committing 300 different cases of Identity theft on the Treasure Coast and South Florida. The two women go by the names of Tychell Letrein Robinson, 33 and Patrice V. Johnson, 26. According to the Federal Trade Commission, in 2007 Florida took fifth place in nation with regards to the number of ID theft victims per 100,000 residents. The FTC also estimated that about 9 million Americans have their identities stolen every year. The Fort Pierce Police Department, the Port St. Lucie Police Department, the Sheriff's Office as well as the U.S. Postal Service worked together in a two year investigation in order to track down these two criminals. Law enforcement agencies discovered that the arrested had somehow managed to steal the personal information of several victims and open new accounts in their names. Authorities believe that the women bought a lot of their identifying information from accomplices. In a news conference on Monday afternoon, Sheriff Ken Mascara mentioned that criminal circles were well aware that the arrested would pay accomplices $50 in exchange for peoples sensitive information. Authorities discovered that the two women met while they were both under the employment of Liberty Medical. Apparently Robinson headed the criminal operation and taught Johnson all she needed to know with regards to making thousands of dollars every week through identity theft. The arrested managed to target victims in Florida from Orlando to Clearwater and even Palm Beach. The majority of victims were from St. Lucie County and the Treasure Coast. Unfortunately it is still not clear to law enforcements exactly how the women obtained all the stolen information. police.jpg It was in the early hours of Monday morning that the police arrived at the homes of the arrested with search warrants. Two vehicles, six computers and ledgers filled with victims sensitive information were confiscated by authorities, and the women w