We’ve reported on the prevalence of laptop theft in many ways. The crime is rampant, frequently places consumers’ valuable data records in harm’s way, and costs billions. And now we can top off all this with the fact that many organizations seem to take forever to notify those whose data records are on stolen machines that their identities just might be in danger.

Take the recent news from across the pond.

This week, The Irish Times and others are reporting that the country’s Department of Social and Family Affairs lost a laptop computer to theft–a year ago. Furthermore, the agency is apparently just now contacting the social welfare recipients whose personal details were stored on the computer–all 380,000 of them, including about 100,000 whose bank account information was mixed in with the records on the machine.

Is it any wonder that consumers “are dissatisfied with the notification process used by companies following a data breach affecting their personal information,” according to a news release covering recent research from the Ponemon Institute on 1,795 U.S. consumers? The Consumer’s Report Card on Data Breach Notification reveals that more than 55 percent of respondents to the Ponemon survey report receiving notification of a data breach more than one month after the incident. Additionally, 50 percent of respondents rate the timeliness, clarity and quality of these notifications as only fair or poor.

While Ponemon’s research doesn’t specifically explore cases in which victims have waited as long as a year after an event occurs before even learning that the theft indeed happened (and that the incident left their information in peril for all that time), consumers on both sides of the Atlantic probably don’t like the idea. Needless to say, a viable laptop tracking and data recovery solution would have gone a long way in helping Ireland’s social welfare agency to retrieve its own laptop–and, more importantly, other people’s data that just so happened to be on the organization’s mobile computing device.