Head of HMRC Resigns ahead of commons statement today Re details of 15 MILLION child benefit claims on lost disc

[VeniVidiVickiQV]

bbc news

I loved Darling's statement that there's no evidence of any fraud yet... might that be because we all JUST FOUND OUT and haven't looked at our bank statements yet??? FFS, what's the bank supposed to do when HMRC ring up and say, well, ahem, we've lost the personal details of 50% of your customers. Do keep an eye out for any unusual activity...

Darling strikes me as an unlucky chancellor. And Brown is looking like an unlucky PM.

Northern Rock could have easily happened to any government. Question is, how you handle it. Not looking too good.

I agree Edam, it's beginning to look like their time is up.

So say the criminals who, lets face it, have been allowed to flourish unchallenged get hold of this information.

Will the government compensate anyone whose life is ruined? Or will they do a shimmy-side step and give a typical response of "well, you can't pinpoint that you were robbed blind and have no life now because we lost a disk with everything a crim needs to fleece you silly so tough luck m'dear."

Wisnae-me politics. And if the criminal gangs have details of our children who is to stop fraud happening to their shiny clean credit rating as soon as they turn 18?

Time to call a vote of no confidence on this government before the whole country goes down the toilet.

Alistair Darling does look perturbed though.

Is there any advice from the government at all over this?

Even if they find the discs there is still the issue that they could have been copied.

Something i guess we all need to watch out for for a long time.

Goodness, people are getting a little hysterical over this. You can't blame the Chancellor. A junior official broke all the rules and ignored all the guidelines and put all that information on a disc. How can that be the fault of the Government as a whole? You can't blame the minister every time some idiot makes a mistake.

lyrasilvertongue
yes it was junior bod that did this
measures should be in place so that this shoddy practice did not take place
ministers used to be ARE accountable for this THEY ARE IN CHARGE, ultimately, supposedly....
there is a regulator who is not allowed to regulate properly
you are very generous of spirit but ultimately uber misguided imho

edam
unlucky maybe..
but definately incompetant and
am thinking
piss up
brewery
organise
not

We should all club together and blinking get something done about the breaches in the Data Protection Act. What is the point in all the claptrap about being protected under the act except to lull us all into a patently false sense of security about dishing our personal information out. These organisations make assurances about the safety of the information with almost every document you sign. Let's hold them to account for this! Hoist them by their own bloody petards.

That's me on my high horse - I'm getting the letter writing head on tomorrow.

Also, why couldn't they use a courier, registered post, or some other fecking safer way of sharing our info?

at last we finally know where it all is

carnival
thats a damn good idea you know

what worries me is this is just the stuff we know about..and its not the first time either

i think darling just has to go

i laughed when jon snow said tonight about resigning mandarin why did he resign, why was he not sacked?

Oh fgs, if a Minister resigned for every mistake made by a junior official there wouldn't be any left!

HIgh-level resignations can REDUCE accountability because the person who actually cocked up isn't held to be responsible - they can hide behind the person at the top. I would argue that's how a culture of error grows. But it makes the press/public feel good to have a scalp so the whole pointless scapegoating every time something happens will go on.

Of course it's the Government's fault. We used to have one Department which collected one sort of tax(PAYE etc), another department collected a different sort of tax (VAT) and another department which gave out benefits. The Labour Government then decided to centralise everything into HMRC and created a mess. That's why we had the Tax Credits fiasco: civil servants who used to collect tax were suddenly in charhe of giving out benefits and they were surprised when they made a balls-up of it.
It's all to do with the control-freak mentality.

I agree that the range of problems at HMRC have their roots in decisions taken years ago by the Govt but this particular incident, let us be clear, was an individual or a number of individuals being slack about security.

I don't want to go over the top in defending Darling but neither of these elements is his doing.

So when the NHS databse gets compromised then that won't be their fault either?

carnival it was sent by courier - TNT. Obviously that didn't guarentee its safety. I would imagine that there was no real need for it to be on disks and sent physically anyway. Surely they should be able to send encryted data directly between HMR&C and the NAO using FTP or something similar.

Nangnangnang, at last someone who agrees with me.
Hairyirene, I don't think it's fair to call me misguided. I don't want to see Alistair Darling sacked BECAUSE HE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG.
Are you saying that every time an employee makes a mistake, his/her boss should resign? There would be no bosses left.
This junior official BROKE THE RULES set in place by his bosses to prevent this sort of thing. That information should never have been copied onto discs, never mind posted. The boss makes the rules and if someone breaks them hen how can the boss be blamed?
I really hate this knee-jerk reaction of automatically blaming the minister every time someone does something wrong in a government department. The official involved did something extremely stupid. HE is the one who deserves the sack.

WWMC i'nm not saying systemic failures have nothing to do with the Govt. What I'm saying is that accountability is far too complex to be resolved by picking out the man at the top (in the job for six months so hardly to blame for the merger which has caused HMRC such grief and hardly responsible for the errors of a junior official).

If there are systemic failures there is very blunt tool for holding the people responsible to account: it's called a general election.

carnival- great name, any reason? (just coz Dh is a carnival bod and we wondered if we knew you LOL- Somerset scene)

'measures should be in place so that this shoddy practice did not take place'

there are measures in palce that should rpevent this, all information between offices should travel by databag which is a sealed postal bag that travels by courier and should only be opened under the supervision of the post team- a team of 3 person, one a junior (AA), one a next l;evel up type (AO) and one EO (junior officer). Items from the office should be palced in that abg each day, the office clerk should seal it and then have it booked out by a special driver, not the royal mail. Now, either it went in the wrong bag (a possibility as the main offices send out many) in which case its lost in an office somewhere but safe; or someone acted completely against guidelines and placed it in an envelope which went via the RM- now if that happened its the fault purely of the Junior because unless things have changed very dramtically indeed, they will ahve been trained to NOT do this under any circumstance. Unless the managers re-opened every envelope and checked contents prior to despatch its unlikely it could have been rpevented in my honest opinion. Each office we had had several officers sending out mail individually for different things (was VAT, so a tribunals / assessments / etc section).

Now, I'm not completely defending HMRC as an organisation- they were a nightmare to work for - the Government at that time (just pre- labour) treated them like shite, and so diod the public- and they ahd the usual problem of a succession of temps, on fixed term contracts, who were constantlya ware fo their lack of membership of the 'gang'. But the systems were in place, even if poeple often blatantly ignored them.

'carnival it was sent by courier - TNT'

OK...... NOW I get it!

(Pechys Dh works alongside TNT and knows that Amazon have already threatened to remove contracts as they are cocking it all up, and that there is a terribe atmosphere right now with everyone off sick etc due to stress after a big shake up and part buy out).

A TNT cock up. well I never

If it doesn't look like Darling's done anything wrong yet in this matter, just give him time. After all, it's all in how he handles it after the fact that gets him sacked or saves him. But he has been a prime mover in the drive to centralise data storage and has pushed for the id cards. If his resignation would signal the end of the road for id cards and the NHS centralised database, then I'd be all for it.

Basically, if a minister has to hang to get the government to learn a lesson, let it be him.

"in the job for six months so hardly to blame for the merger which has caused HMRC such grief"
So you're saying that it's Gordon Brown's fault.

"there is very blunt tool for holding the people responsible to account: it's called a general election."
And who calls this general election? At a time to suit himself, I might add ...
Gordon Brown!

had a chuckle this morning listening to the radio. someone said how come they can get so much info on a cd, when they burn one they can only get 25 music tracks on there.

re TNT and Amazon
A Royal Mail personage I know well, said Amazon peeps have said, from the frying pan into the fire....