Tax documents lost in the mail for more than 42,000 students at Salt Lake Community College

A memory drive with tax documents for more than 42,000 students at Salt Lake Community College was lost in the mail last week.

The school’s administrators sent out a notice to students on Friday that they were expecting the drive but when they opened the envelope it was empty. “It slipped out of it somehow,” said Joy Tlou, SLCC’s spokesman.

The college contracts with an Arizona-based company to format its 1098-T tax forms, which list how much students pay in tuition and whether they qualify for a reimbursement. Each year, Standard Printing Company in Phoenix mails the school a portable memory device with the documents.

Tlou said when SLCC received the package last week, the envelope was damaged and there was nothing inside. The school is speaking with the delivery service and the company to try to find where it might have fallen out.

The documents include students’ names, addresses, amount they spent on tuition and the last four digits of their social security numbers.

“We’re pretty confident that this information can’t be used to clone an identity,” Tlou added.

The college has worked with the company since 2012, and it has a back-up file of the forms. But Tlou said the school intends to work out a different way to transmit the data in the future.