Civil servant fired in privacy breach had criminal past when hired

By Lindsay Kines and Rob Shaw, Times ColonistDecember 2, 2009

The B.C. government employee at the centre of a widening privacy scandal had a criminal record for credit-card fraud and counterfeiting at the time he was hired, the Times Colonist has learned. Richard Ernest Wainwright, who was recently fired from the Ministry of Children and Family Development, was convicted of theft, unauthorized use of credit-card data, possession and use of counterfeit money, and two counts of possession of stolen property, stemming from a police investigation in Kamloops and Merritt in October 2004. Wainwright was given an 18-month conditional sentence by a B.C. Supreme Court judge in April 2005, court documents show. And yet, in 2007, Wainwright obtained a job with the provincial government under the name Richard Ernest Perran. The job gave him access to sensitive public information. Wainwright could not be reached for comment.

The government yesterday refused to answer a list of questions submitted by the Times Colonist, including whether government policy is to conduct criminal-records checks of new employees. Most recently, Wainwright was an operations supervisor in the medical benefits branch of the Children’s Ministry. RCMP officers raided his Victoria home as part of a fraud investigation in April and seized the sensitive personal records of 1,400 income-assistance clients from the Ministry of Housing and Social Development. Those records included names, dates of birth, medical card numbers, social insurance numbers and income-assistance eligibility amounts.

Even after the RCMP raid, Wainwright was allowed to remain on the job as a civil servant until October, nearly seven months after the Mounties alerted government security about the accusations. The length of time it took to fire Wainwright and alert the government’s clients emerged as a widening scandal in the final days of the recent legislative session. The new revelations about Wainwright’s criminal record also call into question the effectiveness of the government screening process for new employees.The government has ordered two internal reviews of the case.(more)