This year’s Alaska Permanent Fund dividend application has been taken offline amid reports that the state system may be sharing users' personal data with others.
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Several online applicants complained on social media that when they tried to fill out the form, it populated with someone else’s address, Social Security number, contact information and date of birth.
Anne Weske, operations manager for the Permanent Fund Dividend Division, said that as of Tuesday afternoon, her agency had confirmed one case of a user’s personal data being shared. She said she doesn’t believe the problem is widespread, but the PFD Division has taken down the application until the issue is resolved.
Russell Wyatt, who lives in Anchorage, said he accidentally accessed someone else’s information while filling out his PFD application on his personal laptop Tuesday. The page reloaded and filled in the fields with the address, date of birth and Social Security number of a man from Fairbanks whom Wyatt had never met. Wyatt said he called the man to tell him his data had been compromised.
“He thought it was a joke,” Wyatt said — until he began reading off the man’s personal information. The man told Wyatt he’d filled out the PFD application only 10 minutes earlier.
Wyatt said he tried to call the PFD Division but didn’t get an answer, and he also commented on the agency’s Facebook page. As of Tuesday afternoon, he hadn’t heard back.
"I think the state needs to take this more seriously,” Wyatt said.
Cassie Hulse of Anchorage, who has lived in Alaska for about 20 years and said she’s never had any problems with the online application, said she experienced something similar. When she hit “enter” to submit her application, the page reloaded and populated the form with another woman’s information.
When Hulse notified the woman whose information she’d inadvertently received, the woman told her she’d filled out her application about 30 minutes earlier — and she, too, had gotten someone else’s information, Hulse said.
“It’s like a domino effect,” she said.
Weske said there is nothing in the system that would allow user data to be shared but it’s best for applicants to hold off filing until all issues are resolved. State security officials are working to identify the issue, she said.
Applicants have been having trouble with the system since 9 a.m. Tuesday, when the application was supposed to open. Instead, they were met with an error message: “Thank you for your patience as the application is undergoing unexpected maintenance.”
Weske said Tuesday morning that the application was “extremely lagging” and the division was working to identify the cause. Troubleshooters were looking at server overload from multiple people trying to log in as one possible cause, she said.
This year’s application also includes new features that can automatically populate information from prior applications, and those features take more memory, which may have caused the system to stall, she said.
About 100 PFD applications had been received by Tuesday afternoon, according to the real-time counter on the PFD Division homepage.
Weske said no timeline was available for when the application would be running normally again. In the meantime, Wyatt said he has a fraud alert set up on his phone. His identity was stolen two years ago, and he said he doesn’t want it to happen again.