KAILUA-KONA — Marquis ID Systems, which issues state driver’s licenses and ID cards, reported Thursday that a system crash in September resulted in the loss of scans of sensitive personal documents that might prove irretrievable.
The “multiple hard disk crash,” as Marquis described it, coincided with a failure of the company’s backup system and affects roughly 66,500 Hawaii residents. Deanna Sako, director of the Hawaii County Department of Finance, said 9,193 of those residents live on the Big Island.
Materials lost were scanned between Feb. 25 and Sept. 15, 2017. Driver’s licenses and IDs issued during that period remain valid.
Sako said there was no security breach associated with the Sept. 15 crash and that Hawaii County residents affected need not fear their personal data falling into the wrong hands. She added officials are hopeful some of the lost data, which includes scanned documents and fingerprint images, might yet be recoverable.
Marquis, the state and individual counties aren’t likely to move on to other remedies until the recovery effort is exhausted, Sako explained.
“They were able to recover some of the data,” Sako said. “They are planning on issuing something in the mail to (notify those affected). It may not be this week. I think they want to try to retrieve as much data as they can.”
Hawaii County, which was informed about the data loss Thursday morning, will ask those people whose data proves irretrievable to return to their local Department of Motor Vehicles location with all necessary documents and redo fingerprinting.
The DMV will issue the new gold star licenses to all the affected, which will be required of every Hawaii resident by 2020.
Sako said Hawaii County is examining possibilities to expedite the process for the more than 9,000 Big Islanders who might need to plan an extra trip to the DMV.
“We’re looking at a lot of things, we just haven’t figured out what we’re going to do yet,” she said. “Maybe having extra hours or maybe having a special day for people to come in and trying to make it as easy as possible for them.”
Email Max Dible at mdible@westhawaiitoday.com.