Sherrod Brown: “Ohio is home to one million veterans and servicemembers. On May 22, a couple, 3 weeks ago, the Pentagon announced that…”

“Ohio is home to one million veterans and servicemembers. On May 22, a couple, 3 weeks ago, the Pentagon announced that the names, the Social Security numbers and other personal information of 26.5 million veterans and their spouses, including most of the 1 million in Ohio, across the country, including every living veteran discharged since 1975, had been stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs data analyst. Now, this is a department, the VA, which has a leader, a political appointee, who was rewarded for his service as a national party chair for one of the two political parties, not someone who was put in place because of his lifetime dedication to veterans. This breach of confidence at the VA is unacceptable. To fix this, our government owes to veterans, we should offer veterans free credit reports and work with America's credit bureaus to waive fees associated with placing security alerts on their credit accounts. We should be willing to reimburse veterans for costs caused by identity theft resulting from this scandal, and we should amend the bankruptcy law passed by this body last year. When the bill was then considered, I opposed it, as did many in this body, in part because it did not extend bankruptcy protections to victims of identity theft, which is what could happen to many of these veterans. Veterans trusted that their government would protect this personal information.…”