VA Stopped Publishing Breach Reports About Vets’ Data for Nine Months

For roughly nine months this year, the Veterans Affairs Department stopped posting online quarterly reports that detail information security breaches affecting veterans.

The department continued to share the quarterly reports with Congress during this period, as it is required to do under the 2006 Veterans Benefits, Healthcare, and Information Technology Act, according to a spokeswoman for the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

The department failed, however, to post the reports online as had been common practice going back to 2010. From the first months of 2018 until this Thursday the most recent quarterly breach report on the department’s Office of Management and Budget reporting page was from the fourth quarter of 2017, according to web archives. The quarterly reports refer to quarters of the government’s fiscal year, which ends in September, not to the calendar year.