The responsibility for entering statistical highway data would be shifted from Department of Motor Vehicles employees to state inmates under a proposal in Gov. Mark Sanford’s executive budget.

After privacy and security concerns surfaced Friday, though, a spokesman said the governor would drop the proposal if there were any chance inmates could glean personal information from traffic collision reports.

“We’re obviously not going to initiate any process that violates anyone’s privacy rights,” Sanford spokesman Will Folks said.

The traffic collision reports filled out by law enforcement officers contain information about the accident — time of day, weather conditions, location of the accident and the investigating agency, said state Department of Public Safety spokesman Sid Gaulden.

But the reports also contain personal information about drivers — names, date of birth, sex, race, home address, phone numbers, driver’s license number, make and type of vehicle and insurance information, Gaulden said.

Giving inmates access to such information is “an invitation to identity theft,” said John Crangle, state director for the Washington-based political watchdog group Common Cause.

Transferring the data-entry work to inmates is expected to result in an annual general fund savings of $113,079, according to Sanford’s budget proposal.

But those savings are no comparison to the possible costs of identify theft, which can run into the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for some victims, Crangle said.

“Just think of the possible collateral damage,” he said.

Those inmates working on the data likely would be in the Corrections Department’s Inmate Program Services Division, which aims to give rehabilitative opportunities to inmates. Inmate oversight would come from the Public Safety Department, according to the proposal.

Folks said the proposal will be reviewed to make sure there are no privacy violations.

“The intent all along was to have the Department of Corrections work solely on statistical, not personal, data,” Folks said. “We’ll have to find out if the forms can be provided to Corrections in such a way that do not violate driver’s privacy rights.”

While it’s valuable to give inmates opportunities to work, “it seems to me there are a lot of other jobs inmates can do. I’m not sure inmates would learn much from this simple, repetitive task,” Crangle said.

Motor Vehicles spokeswoman Beth Parks said the Driver Privacy Protection Act, which protects the use of personal information from DMV records, is not applicable to a state or government agency or an entity doing work for such an agency.

But it’s not clear into which category state inmates fall. They’re not state employees, but they would be paid for the work, Parks said.

The DMV uses the statistics to determine who is at fault and who is charged in an accident and makes sure that information gets to the driver’s record, Parks said.

The Public Safety Department also uses the information in its annual traffic fact book put together by the Office of Highway Safety, Gaulden said.

The information is used to plan road projects — such as whether to put a stoplight at an area with many traffic incidents — and is used by insurance companies.

Crangle said the proposal goes against a national trend of governments being more sensitive to privacy issues.

Staff Writer Jeff Stensland contributed to this report.