University officials have been working to notify the individuals who were affected by an accidental release of personnel records.

On April 14 a student worker in the Office of Records Management took 11 cases of records from the office as a prank. Friday the Coles County Sheriff’s Department told the university that shredded records had been found alongside a road.

Right now the university officials are working on telling those who were affected, said treasurer Paul McCann.

“We are dealing with people’s personal information,” McCann said. “We are very upset that this happened, and we are trying to deal with it to the best of our ability.”

The 11 cases of released data contained personnel information from 2000 to 2005.

“What we’ve recovered at first was all of the items from 2002,” McCann said.

This kind of data is stored on campus for accounting and historical reasons, McCann said.

“We are very close to being able to take care of this,” McCann said.

The office is trying to get a list of the specific people affected, which includes a portion of those employed on campus in 2002.

“But we aren’t going to pick apart the shredded paper, we can’t say that within the shredded paper certain people were affected and others weren’t so we are erring on the side caution and notifying everyone,” McCann said.

University officials are now setting up outlets for the employees who were affected.

A website, a phone bank and a credit monitoring system are being put into place to aid those who may have been affected.

The student worker who took the shredded documents was dismissed from his position.

“In his defense, he was very honest and very concerned with what he did once we pointed out what had happened,” McCann said.

The bulk of the documents were recovered on Friday.

Kayleigh Zyskowski can be reached at 581-7942 or [email protected].