|
|
20 Nov 2007
Alistair Darling was forced to admit to today that the personal details of 25 million people, saved on two disks, had been lost by HM Revenue & Customs.
Speaking in the commons, the chancellor said that the disks had gone missing when a junior HMRC official flouted HMRC procedure by sending child benefit information to the NAO in October through HMRC's internal post system, operated by TNT.
The disks never arrived at the NAO and were not registered or recorded. The disks contain the bank account details, national insurance numbers, addresses and names of 25 million people and 7.25 million families.
Earlier this year the taxman lost a CD containing the details of 15,000 Standard Life pension holders when an HMRC employee's laptop was left in the car boot and stolen.
However, the latest data protection breach has cost HMRC chairman Paul Gray his job.
PricewaterhouseCoopers chairman Kieran Poynter has now been called in by Darling to conduct an investigation of HMRC's document-handling procedures. Poynter will produce an interim report next month and release a full report in the spring.
The profession was left staggered by the news and Gray's shock resignation.
'Whilst I understand the magnitude of the problem relating to the loss of records it is a great shame that it resulted in Paul Gray's resignation because under his leadership HMRC was just beginning to get its act together,' said Richard Mannion, national tax director at Smith & Williamson.
You may also like
Search thousands of financial jobs:
Search thousands of financial jobs:
Careers
Search for jobs
Click to search our database of all the latest accountancy roles
Create a profile
Click to set up your profile and let the best recruiters find you
Jobs by email
Sign up to receive regular updates with the latest roles suitable for you
Briefings
By looking at the reasons supplier statements became unfashionable, and the reasons why it is different today, this paper delves into the many benefits that can be obtained by automating the process.
Having a real and true view of your organisation’s current financial position, and having the right systems and processes in place, will ensure that you can make strong choices and are ready to capitalise on opportunities
AccountancyAgeInsight is a frequently updated resource centre for finance professionals, offering a free and easy-to-use digital library of briefings, white papers and other information resources. 
Visitor comments Add your comment
What poppycock!
What strikes me is that HMRC put all of this sensitive data on to CDs because it was "too hard" to just extract the fields that the NAO had asked for.
According to an HMRC official the systems they have in place are not "sufficiently flexible" to do this and they did "not want to overburden the business ... and incur cost" - what poppycock!
What systems are HMRC running? Selecting just those fields that were required by the NAO should be no more than a five-minute job with appropriate software.
Posted by: Steve Tuck, Datanomic, 27 Nov 2007 | 00:00