Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Am I One of the 15,000?

I have a pensions policy and an endowment with Standard Life. I've just heard that the financial details of 15,000 Standard Life customers have been lost by HM Customs & Revenue. On top of this HM Revenue & Customs have lost more personal data in a much wider breach of security. It is scant consolation that the Chairman of HM Revenue & Customs has taken responsibility and resigned. I suppose it is too much to ask for a Treasury Minister to take responsibility too.

UPDATE: Unbelievable. They have lost 7.5 million records relating to child benefit. There has to be political accountability here.

33 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Ian

Thanks for doing our job for us

Best of luck in Maidstone

Dave & George

Anonymous said...

Iain, why? They don' take responsibility for anything else.

Geoff said...

They have 'lost' my 17 year old daughters NI number - some admin hiccup apparently. More like a large burp it looks like

Anonymous said...

Regarding the latest news...

"Revenue and Customs says it does not believe the records - names, addresses and bank accounts - have fallen into the wrong hands."

Really? How do they know? Where is the data now?

Gordon Brwon must resign. This government is not fit for purpose.

Who says ID cards area good idea??

S B said...

Paul Gray, Head of Revenue and Customs, has resigned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=4CZMRZT4MGELLQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2007/11/20/ncustoms220.xml

Anonymous said...

Sorry Iain.

15 million.

I caught the Radio Reports - on my blog.

Anonymous said...

Political accountability?

Like what? Say: Lessons learnt? Sorry? Resign?

That's so useless...!

Chancellor Kohl was the famous pioneer of this modern method of 'politcal accountability' -- you just sit it out, and if you've a big butt to do it with that also happens to flatten dissent when it descends, well, all the better to sit with.

Because, what are the people you're stylin on going to do about it? Exactly, nothing, you can do what you bloody like once you're elected, the 'boss' (aka the people) has no way of sacking you or doing anything other than rage and rant. So what.

Brown should be put up for a treason trial if and when he signs the EU constitution. Darling and the boss of HRMC (and everyone else) should be personally liable for what they break when on the job. But they aren't and until we make them, they won't.

Incompetence should not be an excuse but a crime in the top jobs. And unless we police politics a lot sharper and timelier and get a better mechanism than election and heckling to prosecute inept and lying politicians, we will have to kiss democracy good-bye.

Anonymous said...

15 million according to the BBC, Iain. Presumably the head of HMRC had to go in order to allow Darling to cling to office.

Of course, I will be the first to congratulate him if he resigns.

Anonymous said...

why the 10 day delay before announcing this? Were they worried about the "lines to take"?

Curbishly said...

ID cards anyone??

Anonymous said...

They have also lost the personal details of fifteen million children.

Time for this dreadful Chancellor to resign.

Paul Evans said...

Huh. I have a pension with Standard Life too. Great stuff...

Man in a Shed said...

The BBC reported 15 million records this lunchtime. If so then given there is one record per 2 parents (roughly) that's 30 million people. Given at least 15 million children ( unless they are all resident in Poland ) that 45 million + , assuming the rest are single or post kids adults it can be assume that they have lost all of the records.

Or at least somewhere close.

Anonymous said...

accountability? from NuLiebour? you having a laugh?

apparently brown has bottled pmqs tomorrow and gone to Uganda to look for the discs!

Anonymous said...

The Story about Standard Life was in the News three weeks ago Iain. Wonder why you are bringing it up now.

Intersecting this one. The Child Benefit reciords. Lost OR Stolen to order. I'm beginning to smell a rat. Will cause major embarrassment to Treasury, just when A Darling is in a bit of a pickle with N Rock, and the Government are trying to push through ID cards. Stolen by an anti government Civil servant or even more sinister stolen by pro opposition supporter. Conservative MP Michael Fallon today, said there had been "persistent rumours that all is not well at Revenue and Customs". OH really….And then this story conveniently breaks. Very Interesting.

Anonymous said...

This goes back to Gordon Brown - it is not only Alastair Darling who should resign - Gordon Brown has a moral obligation to resign.

This catastrophe was created during Brown's tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Down with Labour. Enough is enough.

Anonymous said...

Dear Iain

How on Earth do you lose 15,000 + 7.5 [or is it 15 or 50] million records ?

This seems to be a massive, incomprehensible logistical-achievement

If those responsible can be apprehended, shouldn't they be sentenced to a thousand years Community Service running the NHS

Your obedient servant etc

G Eagle

Anonymous said...

Can't wait for id cards then...

Anonymous said...

Iain, the title of your thread is an understatement.

Please will you consider revising it - we are talking about 15 MILLION PEOPLE!

Anonymous said...

BBC, Have Your Say is littered with people claiming that this spells the end of ID cards. I'd be checking out the Colehill Campaigning Service offices.

The disc, I have no doudt has been stolen on purpose to have this affect.

Anonymous said...

The head of Customs and Revenue has been forced to resign. Was he Ex-Revenue or Ex-Customs before the merger, ill advised, merger?

Do we blame Brown for the merger, Darling for the cock-up or (surely not)are both at fault?

Any money on its being none of the above?

Man in a Shed said...

Geoff (1.22pm) - you may also like to know that NI numbers aren't unique, as a friend who works in that area of IT told me a while ago.

Anonymous said...

anonymous [2:01 PM] I expect the anti-government civil servant who stole all these records was in league with the National Rifle Association and the Christian Fundamentalists of Alabama; or possibly with Rupert Bear and Algy Pug.

Anonymous said...

Just heard Adam Boulton. Police are involved. CCS must be bracing themselves

Anonymous said...

As Simon Jenkins said recently, this country now has third world standards of public adminstration.

Anonymous said...

Title should now be:

"Am I One of the 25m People?"

Gordon Brown won't be PM for much longer.

The public will DEMAND a general election.

Anonymous said...

Why would anyone but the idiot who decided to ignore the rules and do it a different way (and their direct superior) take responsibility?

Anonymous said...

I believe the details were lost in transit by the courier company TNT. It just so happens that I had a parcel delivered last week by TNT. They delivered it to the wrong house 3 miles away. The only thing the two addresses had in common was that the roads started with the same letter of the alphabet. Other than that they weren't even the same number. Luckily the woman who took it in looked me up the the phone book and delivered it herself. I'm appalled to discover the government trusts these illiterate morons to deliver anything.

Anonymous said...

Dear McSweeney - clearly the rules and procedures are useless if they can be broken or abused in such an easy manner.

The government must be held accountable. Brown must resign as a matter of honour. He had 10 years to sort this out. He didn't.

Anonymous said...

I sent a couple of cheques by post on 18 and 19 october - thye did not arrive and the recipient, a postcard dealer, said several other letters posted to him around the same time failed to arrive. We decided they were probably lost in the backlog from the Postal Strike and now buried in a landfill somewhere. Ditto the government records in my opinion.

What puzzles me is why Paul Gray of the Revenue resigned. Why didn't he play the Ian Blair card - "It happened on my watch and I have 'fessed up" so I should be allowed to stay and put things right"?
Honeyrose

Anonymous said...

Easy. Thanks to casual labour, much of it recently arrived, postal and courier services are simply not secure.

And then there are between 5-10,000 illegals actually cleared for security work.

Public admin is collapsing. But then we are into the third generation of bog-standard comps, so the workforce has no eye for detail. And, yes I went to one...

Anonymous said...

Forget Darling.

Brown has been chief cock in the Treasury for the last 10 years.

Any security procedures (if any)were put in place whilst he was in charge.

Darling was too scared to be interviewed. The media had to make do with a permanent secretary to take the flak. (Marr inexplicably was unavailable on this occasion....probably checking his bank account)

She said, the security procedures were in place but not followed.

Tell me, please, if the procedures were in place how come a 'junior' member of staff can download 25 million computer records onto two disks? The whole database! Does Stanilav also have access?

It has been known for 'junior' members of staff to be short of a bob or two. In fact with taxes as they are,short of a bob or three. Yet a'junior' has complete unrestrained access to download the whole shebang?

She then went on and on about nobody having stolen anything yet.
Possibly because they are too busy applying for thousands of legitimate passports in the name of every child in Britain.

If all this was possible last September, then it was bound to be possible when Brown was Chancellor.

If anybody should resign it's Brown

Anonymous said...

Standard Life? At least you weren't with Equitable Life. Pension fund to the professional classes, until it went tits up. For obvious reasons, the govt had somewhat less interest in shoring that up than a bank the majority of whose customers and shareholders live in its NorthEast heartlands.