In testimony last summer, OPM CIO Donna Seymour said that systems couldn’t simply have encryption added, because some of them were over 20 years old and written in COBOL. (The statement was only partially accurate.)

The Office of Personnel Management’s chief information officer, Donna Seymour, resigned Monday, two days before she was scheduled to face a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the theft of data from the OPM’s network discovered last year. A spokesperson for the OPM confirmed to Ars that Seymour had resigned, saying “she has retired.”

Seymour told colleagues at the OPM in an e-mail message that she was departing to make sure that her presence at the office “does not distract from the great work this team does every single day for this agency and the American people,” according to a report by USA Today’s Erin Kelly.

House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) cancelled the planned hearing for Wednesday on the OPM hack. “Ms. Seymour’s retirement is good news and an important turning point for OPM,” he commented in a prepared statement. “While I am disappointed Ms. Seymour will no longer appear before our Committee this week to answer to the American people, her retirement is necessary and long overdue. On her watch, whether through negligence or incompetence, millions of Americans lost their privacy and personal data. The national security implications of this entirely foreseeable breach are far-reaching and long-lasting. OPM now needs a qualified CIO at the helm to right the ship and restore confidence in the agency.”