Two and a half years after retail giant TJX Companies, Inc (parent company to TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Home Goods) experienced one of the largest data breaches in history, the firm is still paying. This time, the settlement provides $9.7MM across 41 states to help protect consumers from payment card negligence. One quarter of those funds are devoted to creating a national fund that will investigate future data breaches.
In reality, the latest sum TJX has to pay is small potatoes compared to the capital outlay the retailer has made since 2007 to mitigate the security breach that exposed 45 million credit and debit card numbers. When the leak was discovered, TJX set aside $107MM to deal with the fallout and the expenditures to date are in that range. In two of the largest settlements, they’ve paid $24MM to MasterCard and $41MM to Visa banks. In addition, TJX has been ordered to undergo costly external audits every other year for 20 years by the FTC.
Is it 100% possible for companies to avoid costly and negative public facing situations such as this?
