Request By:
Mr. Laurence J. Zielke
Director of Law
City of Louisville
City Hall
Louisville, Kentucky 40202
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Carl Miller, Assistant Attorney General
In your letter to this office dated February 26, 1979 and signed for you by Henry Watson III, Deputy Director of Law, you state as follows:
"The Department for Human Resources has requested the City of Louisville to provide a computer listing of the Social Security numbers of City of Louisville employees, to include employees of joint City/County agencies for which the City serves as fiscal agent. The purpose of the request is to match these Social Security numbers with Social Security numbers of people receiving financial assistance from the Department of Human Resources in order to discover possible violations of statute or regulation."
You state that the City of Louisville will forward the requested information to the Department for Human Resources upon receipt of an opinion of the Attorney General that such procedure does not violate the rights of the individuals concerned. It is our opinion that the exchange of such information does not violate any state or federal law or any common law right to privacy. The Kentucky Open Records Law expressly provides as follows:
"The provisions of this section shall in no way prohibit or limit the exchange of public records or the sharing of information between public agencies when the exchange is serving a legitimate governmental need or is necessary in the performance of a legitimate government function." KRS 61.878(4)
We believe that the exchange of the information requested serves a legitimate governmental purpose and is therefore authorized under the Kentucky Open Records Law, KRS 61.870-61.884.