Opinion

posted on 26 June 2008 10:09

The combined UK Revenue and Customs and tax collection departments get shoe-horned into a single organisation, lose several hundred employees and then lose the child benefit details of over a third of the UK's adult population: 25 million people, by posting two unencrypted CDs in an insecure inter-departmental courier transfer.

No-one is fired, publicly-disgraced, fined or named and shamed. Instead Kieran Poynter, Chairman and senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, writes a 100-page report that concludes cultural failings were to blame, the inadequate system, and not people.

Poynter did not find "any evidence of malice or knowing disregard for policy or procedure in any of the circumstances leading to this loss." What about incompetence and sheer crassness. Did he find any of that?

So what was it down to? "... an unfortunate catalogue of inter-locking factors."

Jeez, I could expain away the Iraq war with such prose.

If this is brown stuff on a fan I can't smell it at all. It's been deodorised out of all recognition and replaced by the sweet perfume of 'learning lessons' and 'moving forward' and, in that old and clapped-out cliche, building a world-class service. What, world-class as in Zimbabwean democracy and Burmese flood relief?

Look, my dearly beloved UK government masters, systems are run by people. People set up this combination of Revenue, Customs and Taxation and then under-funded it so it could not do its job properly. That was the then-Chancellor and now Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Then the dratted department, composed of two institutions with a long history of dealing with sensitive and confidential financial information from busineses and people, forgot what it knew and started ferrying unencrypted data around on CDs.

The 25 million CD loss is not an isolated incident. UK government as a whole is riddled with insecure data practices, for example, here  and here.

A chairman of the HMRC, Paul Gray has gone, standing down in November when the disk loss became public. His punishments, well, where do I start? He's only got a niggardly £400,000 payoff when asked to leave. Asked to leave? So not sacked but given a golden parachute.

We want blood. In the US senior military men get fired when nuclear material is mis-handled. In the UK guilty government ministers and senior civil servants gather tremblingly together behind 100 pages of a report and all the brown stuff hurled at them just slides off its Teflon pages, leaving them snow white.

Damn near thirty million people have been put at severe and long-term risk of identity theft through crass arrogance and incompetence and not one person has been sacked or even, get this, reprimanded, named, shamed or blamed.

Where is the honour in this? Who, amongst the tens and hundreds of people involved has had the character to stand up, admit failings, and walk out into the bleak night? No-one. They're shameless cowards and jobsworths all.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}