KY health cabinet ‘glitch’ revealed new names of people who fled dangerous homes
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- A state government system glitch exposed new identities of 2,465 people.
- Leaked names were sent to former households, apparently without alerting victims.
- The ombudsman pressed officials to notify affected individuals by Sept. 15.
A “system glitch” at the Kentucky Health and Family Services Cabinet revealed the new identities of more than 2,400 people whose names were changed after they moved out of their homes to escape dangerous situations, according to records the Lexington Herald-Leader obtained through the Open Records Act.
Many, if not most, of the affected individuals are adopted children, but there also might be some survivors of domestic violence who restarted their lives under new names, state officials say.
In each case, the new names were sent by letter to the “head of household” where they once lived.
“Obviously, there’s no way you can claw back the information and make the person who shouldn’t have the information forget that they now have it,” said Alexander Magera, general counsel for State Auditor Allison Ball.
“But at the very least, we can hopefully put these people on notice that they’ve been affected by this, and so they can do what they need to do to protect themselves as best as they can, right?” Magera said.
Kristina Brooks, of Mason County, learned of the cabinet’s mistake when she got a text in May from the biological mother of three siblings she adopted out of foster care in 2020.
The biological mother’s criminal record included convictions for drug abuse, drunken driving and wanton endangerment for putting her kids’ lives at risk, court records show. In a Dec. 15, 2021, letter approving the biological mother’s Medicaid benefits, the cabinet included the new names of each of her three children, by then adopted by and living with Brooks. The cabinet explained the children were not eligible to share in her Medicaid benefits because they were outside of her household.
Doing some online sleuthing with the children’s names, the biological mother eventually tracked them to Brooks.
“Just thought I should let u know this is how I know my children’s new names,” she wrote to Brooks. “The state of Kentucky is not smart sending me this.”
Separately, the biological mother also reached out to two of the kids, then in their teens.
Brooks panicked.
The reason she changed the children’s full names — not an easy thing to do, either legally or for the kids as human beings — was to help them escape their past with their deeply troubled mother, she said.
Before the kids were removed by the state of Kentucky, the biological mother had even ruined the children’s credit ratings by running up huge debts in their names, Brooks said — something she could try again now that she has their new names.
“What are you gonna do? Change their names again? You can’t,” she told the Herald-Leader by phone this week. “These kids, the youngest are 11 and 16 years old, and this has been their name for five years. We can’t just change them again. And we can’t put it back in the box. They’re out there now.”
Brooks said she immediately reached out to the state health cabinet for answers, repeatedly calling and emailing Frankfort, but she got little response.
More helpful was the Office of the Ombudsman, which is attached to the state auditor’s office. The ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints about the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
The ombudsman prodded the cabinet to look into the problem.
Together, they determined that the children’s Social Security numbers were the issue. The numbers were never delinked from the biological mother’s public benefits eligibility file. So when she applied for Medicaid years after they were gone, the system automatically updated the biological mother’s file to include her former dependents, along with their new names.
And it sent her a letter with that information.
“OMG this is awful,” a social services clinician at the cabinet wrote as officials began to grasp the scope of the problem.
On June 23, a cabinet caseworker told Brooks that “a system-wide fix was applied that will affect 2,465 individuals and will stop their information from being present on cases they were removed from if they’ve changed their name,” according to cabinet documents.
Brooks had questions.
Were these 2,465 people warned that their new names had been revealed? The cabinet would not tell her. Were all of them adopted children, or were some from other situations, like victims of domestic violence who fled their abusive spouses and changed their names once they had relocated? The cabinet would not tell her.
“They’re not saying anything,” Brooks said.
“That’s my biggest thing. I want to know that this is fixed,” she said. “You know, this isn’t going to go away. How are they going to hide this from 2,400 people?”
The state health cabinet did not respond to the Herald-Leader’s requests for comments for this story. It also denied the newspaper’s open records request for documents from its internal investigation into the information leak.
However, Brooks and the ombudsman’s office shared the public documents in their possession.
On Monday, the ombudsman’s office sent a letter to Lesa Dennis, commissioner of the cabinet’s Department for Community Based Services, urging her to explain what — if anything — her agency is doing to notify the 2,465 individuals whose new identities appear to have been leaked.
“If your office is unwilling to notify the 2,465 affected by this issue, we would ask to be given a list of those individuals so that we can evaluate any next steps for our office to take. We request that the explanation identified above or the list of 2,465 be provided by Sept. 15,” the ombudsman’s office wrote.
