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As an employee of HMRC I have to say I surprised this hasn’t happened long before now, but what fool sends a sensitive document by normal post even registered post isn’t safe, they should have driven it there personally or what should happen it should be done over an internet line not put on a disk anyway.
Well you wait til the get rid of another 12,000 of us and shut 300 offices the cock ups will just get worse.
Better not say anymore official secrets act and all that
…this is appalling. I’m always worried about identity theft [who’d want to have mine
] but although it doesn’t involve me I would be very worried about this, in fact I think I’d be paranoid. The government are bumbling idiots, they want to introduce ID cards and get even more information about people than they’ve already got.
I read on the news it was 25million people, thats half the population.
Much as I absolutely despise this government and all it stands for, I do not think this is a matter for the Chancellor to resign or something "the Government" can be blamed for. This could have happened whichever party was in power.
My understanding is there are secure procedures in place for the transfer of files like these and that someone at a seemingly low level in the organisation ignored those procedures. The head of HMCR has resigned and he must be admired for that. However I would also hope that if procedures were ignored then those who ignored the procedures are dealt with severely.
I can tell you Mr Gray’s predecessor would not have resigned he was an arrogant man with no regard for anyone he was responsible for shutting all the gas show rooms he started the procedure for shutting down 300 tax offices by 2011 and shelving 25,000 jobs, theres no staff morale as for the last 12 months weve been waiting for them to tell us which are shutting and the chances of moving offices and possible redundancies.
Judging by Mr Brown’s sneer when this was mentioned we know where he stands he was my boss technically for 9 years.
As for not blaming Mr Darling the governement implement the rules therefore the buck stops with them rememeber Mr Darling is also in hot water for Northern Rock.
I dont undertstand why the needed to put everyones details on 2 disc they cant audit everyone.
I suspect what may have happened is someone will have told a low grade staff member to post the discs and not tell them what was on it the new government rules say departments cant use 1st class mail for anything and should avoid recorded delivery if possible so the staff member may have thought it wasn’t important enough to warrant a higher postage.
Most of the staff at Child Benefit in Washington are new to the job as it moved from newcastle.
This sort of sh*t really gets my goat. These people are paid alot of money to make decisions and make sure things go to plan. It’s called management whether it be a normal manager or senior manager. I’m fed up with this Government, as it’s apology/mistake after mistake.
Steve et al, I’m not unsympathetic on the matter as the ramefications for this development are a bit worse than bad; but to develop a point of Paul’s, baying for resignations en masse in this instance is a bit like burning your bed to kill a flea.
I’d have to query how the redundancies that there have been, and those regrettably yet to come, would have directly precipitated what appear at this remove to be the actions of one individual in one office who failed to apply the required level of basic common sense.
One wouldn’t rush to buy anything off eBay from him or her.
gc
Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
Because they have closed the postrooms in most smaller offices and the people who were experienced and sent out the mail may have queried the package before it left.
Anyway its a giant cock up and theres no getting away from it.
Incidentally if the governement and revenue hierarchy didnt keep changing the way things are done every week it might help even though the departments have been merged for two years in a lot of cases they still have two separate rules even the leave and wages systems still are ona diferent system the PAYE system is 20 years old and still uses the old flashing cursors like you had on a bbc micro.
I wouldn’t presume to dub it anything other than a cock-up, Steve. It’s a desperate cock-up.
But at the same time there is similarly little escaping the assertion that if a sensitive software item of the kind involved is to be fed through the wider mail service at all, it should be done so having first been encrypted; and is then sent with all the requisite signed-for labels, return addresses and whatever else; and as a further safeguard may be packaged in such a way as to disguise the actual contents (e.g. CD packaged in a shoebox-sized box).
With the possible exception of the encryption, these hardly rank as life skills unique to the HMRC’s postal personnel. There are almost two strands to this thread already – general eroding of the HMRC from the inside, which is reprehensible; and one person’s failure to mail a CD properly, which was entirely avoidable nevertheless.
gc
Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
I dont know who would have access to this but no one except the very top people should be able to access everyones details and to be able to get £25m records on two disks???
Most HMRC computers have the disk drive disabled so they must know who it is.
When the government make a mistake, no-one will be responsible, it is the culture of our governement and so called business leaders, to be above the law and operate under different rules to the masses. By simply saying, this is an operational problem and I’m responsible for policy, they get out of jail free.
On the other hand when they make a mistake which effects you, you are responsible for sorting it out. Anyone who has had dealings with any of the useless government agencies know’s all about that.
On Tuesday the chancellor told MPs how the entire child benefit database was sent by a junior official from HMRC in Washington, Tyne and Wear, to the audit office in London through courier TNT on 18 October. The information was contained on two CDs.
The chancellor said the official had broken the rules by downloading the data to disc and sending it by unrecorded delivery.
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i don’t know if i was surprised that paul gray resigned or not but i doubt it will hurt him or his career, he’ll have a bit of time off to concentrate on xmas and be back in another equally high-powered role next year i’d imagine. jack straw once said ‘at any one time there are 20 civil servants making decisions that could lead to your resignation, the trick is knowing who they are’ – should all heads resign everytim something happens wrong in their dept, should landlords lose their licences when their barstaff cock up, should trainers lose their licence if someone working for them cocks up – where does it all begin and end ?
as a career civil servant and working in i.t. i am surprised the entire cb db could be put on 2 cd’s or why anyone would want to but the chancellor’s message above does not bode well for whoever at the lower level did this
the 25 million are everyone who receives child benefit, the details as explained on the bbc website along with a ir helpline if people do have more questions
in the civil service we have internal courier post between all offices and tnt have the contract, we just chuck things in grid envelopes and write ‘j.smith, rm 404, washington cbc’ on the grid or any other form of recognisable address and chuck it in the out tray – it gets picked up and is supposed to be delivered the next day. of course, things go missing from time to time, some are found, some aren’t
should the guy who did this lose his job ? i dunno, if it was just a mistake, albeit one with huge ramifications and visibility, should he be thrown on the dole queue ?
here’s to hoping nothing happens with the data or people’s a/c’s as i had to cancel and re-issue a current a/c debit card awhile back as when purchasing online, someone in one of the shops kept my card details and tried using them elsewhere – were it not for luck i would not have found out until i next got to the bank and noticed my a/c was empty – yes you get it back but who needs the hassle, at any time of the year
Fair points Simon .. but we are forced to trust the government with our personal details, we don’t have a choice. The government tell us they are doing things in this way because it’s safe and it’s efficient. When in fact, they are just caught up in an IT dreamland that doesn’t exist or work in the way that they imagine it does.
For example, when the government changed the way ‘working families tax credits’ were calculated they set up a system where you could claim on-line. From my own experience when we were awarded our first payment, they tell you by post what you are going to get. I received 12 copies of the same letter in the same day and the missus got 6. But even worse than that … the bigger picture
Identity Theft of employees[/url:23zno084], Unrecoveralbe debt[/url:23zno084] how much did it really cost .. around £1Bn a year?
This is just one thing, who is responsible .. no ******.
] but although it doesn’t involve me I would be very worried about this, in fact I think I’d be paranoid. 
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