This must be what a number of employees of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) must have thought as they freely trawled through many peoples personal tax records over the past few years.
According to a written answer parliament by Treasury Minister Jane Kennedy, it has shown that 192 HMRC staff had been disciplined last year (2007), 180 in 2006 and 238 in 2005 for unauthorised access of tax records.
It seems that not only have Senior Managers at the HMRC been presiding over incompetent staff that lost all those child benefit records, but they now seem to have been incapable of managing their staff to ensure that mine and your tax records remain private and only accessible by those that are officially dealing directly with individuals’ tax records.
Another good example of this governments cavalier attitude to data security has come to light. I wonder how much longer they will insist on the ID Cards and other hopelessly insecure data projects.
Beasley's Place 