BATON ROUGE - The Federal Emergency Management Agency says it inadvertently shared the personal information, and in many cases the banking information, of millions of people with one of its contractors. 

The agency announced Monday that identifying information of about 2.5 million people was unnecessarily given to a contractor that supports its Transitional Sheltering Assistance program. It says the information has since been "quarantined, protected, and permanently removed" from the contractor's system.

Roughly 1.8 million of those individuals also had their banking information shared with the contractor. A notice is being mailed out to those affected. 

It's unclear at this time how many people in the capital area have been affected.

FEMA says it will provide credit monitoring services for a period of 18 months to affected survivors who request the service. 

More information can be found here: https://www.fema.gov/news-release/2019/09/03/fema-provides-credit-monitoring-disaster-survivors-affected-major-privacy