The government's enforcement of privacy laws is uneven at best, with federal agencies lacking any way to detect unauthorized reading, altering or disclosing of personal information from about one-fifth of agency files, congressional investigators said Wednesday.
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that enforcement is so spotty that “the government cannot assure the public that individual privacy rights are being protected.”
More than one in four federal agencies, or 29 percent of those surveyed by the GAO, did not have procedures to ensure that personal data about individual Americans that they disclosed to nonfederal groups was complete, accurate, relevant and timely, as required by the Privacy Act of 1974. [Privacy Digest]