Newfoundland and Labrador’s largest health authority is searching for a missing USB drive containing sensitive information on 3,300 of its employees.

“We’ve spent the last few days scouring our offices,” said Eastern Health president and CEO David Diamond.

The health organization also hired a third party specialist that “tore apart” the offices in search of the drive, but the device was not found, Diamond said.

The USB drive was discovered missing from Eastern Health offices on June 19 and contains spreadsheets with the names and social insurance numbers of 3,300 employees.

The drive also contains the employee numbers of another 5,700 Eastern Health workers.

Affected employees are primarily those working in St. John’s whose last names begin with letters from “P” to “Z,” Diamond said.

Part of the concern is that the drive has no password and the information is easily accessible to anyone.

Eastern Health says the unsecured drive was only being used temporarily as the health authority’s human resources department digitized data about its employees.

Diamond said there is no indication the missing drive has been used for any kind of identity theft or that it was stolen in the first place. Still, Eastern Health is taking every precaution to protect affected staff and to make sure nothing like this happens again.

“We likely have a policy gap,” he said.

The office of the province’s privacy commissioner will conduct an independent investigation on Eastern Health to see how the health authority can improve its privacy practices, Diamond said.

Eastern Health says it will cover the cost of credit checks for all employees affected by the lost drive in case the information is stolen.

With a report from NTV News