Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Advanced Education says 415 T4A tax receipts were mistakenly sent to incorrect addresses after errors with an electronic spreadsheet in February of last year.
The ministry reported the incident to the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office in May, which then released an investigation report on Dec. 16.
According to the privacy commissioner’s final report, the incident affected 277 people, with some due to receive more than one T4A document.
At the time of the report’s release in December, the commissioner said 154 T4As belonging to 121 people were still missing.
The report says that an employee responsible for producing mailing labels made an error while working with an Excel spreadsheet that was used to print labels, which resulted in incorrect addresses appearing on the labels.
T4A documents sent to incorrect addresses included the names of people who received grants, social security numbers and amounts of money received in grants during fiscal year 2023, according to the report.
According to Privacy Commissioner Ronald Kruzeniski, the T4As were mailed to incorrect addresses on February 15, 2024.
The grants were primarily for students with disabilities, needs for education-related services or equipment, and special financial needs, according to the report.
Kruzeniski said in the report that the Ministry of Advanced Education took steps to investigate the cause of the misdirected tax forms, locate where the forms were incorrectly submitted and develop a plan to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
He also stated that those affected by the incident were not informed of the possible negative impacts they could experience or what measures affected people should take to possibly protect themselves from the negative consequences of the incident.
Kruzeniski said in the report that measures such as credit card monitoring by the ministry should have been provided to the affected people due to the risks created by the incident and advised the ministry to provide credit monitoring to the 121 people still are affected by the incident at the time their incident report was published.
“The Saskatchewan Ministry of Advanced Education is responsible for developing a skilled and educated workforce that meets the labor market needs of the province,” the province says on its website. “The ministry works with the private sector, educational institutions and community organizations to develop, retain and attract qualified workers.”
The Privacy Commissioner’s full report into the incident can be read here.
