The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has received a letter of apology from the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), by which the NHIF notified him of the measures and activities it had undertaken and those it intended to undertake following the Letter of Warning sent to it by the Commissioner in connection with inadmissible processing of personal data.

The Commissioner sent the Letter of Warning to the NHIF on 6 December 2016, after conducting an inspection in connection with unlawful processing of personal data of underage health insurance beneficiary S.N. contained in the NHIF’s master records and the subsequent posting of those data on the social network Twitter by a member of NHIF’s Management Board.

The Commissioner welcomes the fact that the NHIF, immediately after receiving the Letter of Warning, sent a communication to the managers of all of its organisational units, advising them of their duty to act in compliance with of the Law on Personal Data Protection and apply the statutory data protection measures, as well as of their duty to instruct all employees who control such data to comply with these requirements.

The NHIF has also informed the Commissioner of its intent and desire to continue educating its staff, which will involve their attendance of training events held by the Commissioner, to prepare them to train other NHIF employees who control personal data.

As is his practice in all such cases, the Commissioner will continue making every effort, within the constraints of the available resources, to help educate the NHIF staff about their duties pertaining to personal data protection.