Outgoing Obamacare Security Official never signed off on the site's launch...Eventually signed with a "risk acknowledgement"..

Tony Trenkle, the Obamacare official in charge of HealthCare.gov security efforts announced his resignation Wednesday, effective next week. 

CBS News has learned that Trenkle, the Chief Information Officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), was originally supposed to sign off on security for the glitch-ridden website before its Oct. 1 launch, but didn't. Instead, the authorization on September 27 was given by Trenkle's boss, CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner.

As CBS News reported Monday, security assessments fell behind and the website never had the required top-to-bottom tests. 

Trenkle and two other CMS officials, including Chief Operating Officer Michelle Snyder, signed an unusual "risk acknowledgement" saying that the agency's mitigation plan for rigorous monitoring and ongoing tests did "not reduce the (security) risk to the ... system itself going into operation on October 1, 2013." 

HealthCare.gov exchanges data through a massive hub that includes the IRS, the Social Security Administration, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, the Defense Department, the Office of Personnel Management and the Peace Corps.

Both Democrats and Republicans have raised security concerns in two days of Senate hearings. Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Congress she did not know about the special security waiver that her agency head, Tavenner, granted the website. 

"I was not aware of this and I did not have these discussions with the White House because I wasn't aware of them," Sebelius testified.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

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