UK "woefully inadequate" at handling data

THE UK TAX OFFICE was "woefully inadeqaute" at handling personal data, the Independent Police Complaints Commission reported today.

No s**t sherlock. HM Revenue and Customs lost the personal records of 25m people in the post last October.

The IPCC's revelatory comments were the conclusion of its investigation into the still missing data. "Corporate data handling was clearly woefully inadequate," said Gary Garland, IPCC commissioner in his report today. HMRC had no no "coherent strategy for mass data handling", a "complete lack of any meaningful systems", staff were not trained properly, they lacked support, and they didn't understand the importance of the data they were handling.

One HMRC staffer had squeeked in protest at the vast amounts of personal data being handled so nonchalantly by his colleagues. But he was "rebuked", said the report. Data had been requested by the almighty National Audit Office. HMRC staffers went into something resembling panic, ignoring even the auditor's request that the data was handled carefully.

Garland concluded that the HMRC's data handling procedures were "ineffective ". "An event like this was certain to happen," he said, "the only question being, when?. "Even though it was discovered on 18 october that the personal details of 25m parents and children, including those given a "protect" or " restricted" security level had gone missing. The boob wasn't reported until 8 November.

Garland's report found no evidence of criminality or misconduct among the HMRC staffers. They had been given immunity from prosecution anyway to speed the investigation. The matter had been of some embarrassment to the government. Every time it tried to advance its much-maligned identity card scheme, which will involve handling the personal details and movements of every person in the land on one humungous government database, the government's opponents were able to taunt it with the HMRC example: how can you be trusted with people's biometric identity records when you can't even look after child benefit records properly, went the refrain.

To make matters worse for the government, the IPCC said ultimate blame for the lost child data should rest with "failures in institutional practices and procedures concerning the handling of data".

Data management reforms at the HMRC are ongoing. Although the government doesn't know how to handle data, it does know how to handle the media. Today, on the very same day the Independent Police Complaint's Commission published its report into the HMRC debacle, a Cabinet Office sponsored investigation by Price Waterhouse Coopers was also published, as was the Cabinet Office's new and improved data-handling strategy, as was an MOD-sponsored report on the loss of personal data relating to applicants to the armed forces, as was the MOD's new and improved data-handling strategy.

L'Inq
IPCC report into HMRC data loss (61-page pdf)