A careless error of a computer technician reformatting a disc drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue wiped out data containing $38 billion of state funds. With just one stroke on the computer keyboard, the computer technician, doing routine maintenance work, deleted information for applicants on the oil-funded account, one of Alaska residents biggest perks.

Worst, the technician also mistakenly reformatted the back-up drive.

Repairing the damage could cost the government more than $200,000 since the backup tapes of the account are now unreadable and useless.

Amy Skow, director of the Permanent Fund Dividend Division said, "Nobody panicked, but we instantly went into planning for the worst-case scenario."

Consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc., and experts from the department and division of the state fund are now laboring to retrieve the lost data. At least nine months of work have been lost due to the error.

Among the information lost were the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund, 800 electronic images that had been scanned into the systems months earlier, the 2006 applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter and supporting documents such as birth certificates and proof of residence.

Now the state has to rely on the only backup, which is over 300 cardboard boxes of paperwork. To accomplish the task, half a dozen seasonal workers were now assisting the regular division staff, and about 70 other people are working overtime and weekends to re-enter the lost data, which is expected to be completed by the end of August.

Skow said, "We had to bring that paper back to the scanning room, and send it through again, and quality control it, and then you have to have a way to link that paper to that person's file."

"They were just ready, willing and able to chip in and, in fact, we needed all of them to chip in to get all the paperwork rescanned in a timely manner so that we could meet our obligations to the public," Skow said.