Hi
Blair and Brown - particularly Brown - have created an environment within the public sector that jobs, pensions, retirement, etc, safe, no penalties for incompetence or a good payoff, etc.
Human nature being what it is, service deteriorates, standards lower, etc.
Who allowed a system to be designed with no security ?? Not a 23yr old !!
Sloppy management - and that is the basic problem with the public sector - bad management - and politicians who have no outside experienece of managing people or a business, so they would not recognise bad management.
The fact that common sense has gone out of the window with this lot is the clearest indication.
I could go on, but I won't !!
You can publish if it helps.
Regards
Roger Powell

From what I see they're trying to make the 23 year old to be a scapegoat, whereas the true blunder is that the disk was not sent securely, no encrpytion no safe guards ... No real management..

As Roger Powell said , it was not a 23 year old who designed the system he was just the computer operator doing what he was told...

This is a disgrace.
25 million people should start criminal proceedings against HMRC and the government.

I blame Gordon Brown and his chums for many of the problems our Country faces post 1997. This data screw-up is just the latest in a catelogue of incompetence.

Just put me and Gordon Brown together in a locked room, and give me a couple of pool balls and a good quality sock!

I'll soon have everything sorted...........

Is this the icing on the cake of the total incompetance of the GovernmentInland Revenue and Benefits system? Not only does this system pay out lots of benefits to fraudulent claimers (I know I work with lots of couples pretending to be separated claiming income support, working cash in hand/running businesses,claiming benefits and not declaring tax. A lot of these are not British born). This country is becoming a fraudsters paradise, thanks to our sloppy/incompetent system!

Although governments are responsible for setting standards and laws, it is the HMRC hierarchy that are ultimately responsible. No data of any kind should be required to be dumped onto discs in this manner for transferring to another system. If the audit office require information, then they should have remote access only to the data or reports they need. The only reason data should be downloaded, is for emergency backup procedures, then the data should be treated as if it were gold bullion, copies kept secure and off site, but certainly not for use except in the need of catastrophic system failures. Even then for the most secure sytems, a mirror image should be kept on a parallel system in different buildings, preferable hundreds of miles apart.

The fault is not the poor operator who actually did the task, but I hope he at least questioned the need for this, but his masters who gave the go ahead for this to be done inbreach of data protection regulation. Now the questions is, what other national databases are being dumped onto discs in this manner?

The sad reality is:
These recently publicised blunders will most certainly NOT have been the first occurrances - merely the first time they have been owned up to, or leaked!

An action plan must be discussed by the government immediately to legislate against any organisation UK-wide, where sensitive data handling processes do not meet a new strict level of security compliance BY A SET DATE.

This is a serious matter.
In particular, in this day and age there is absolutely no justification for for personal data leaving an organisation in the form of disc/hard copy report/etc.... at all, let alone being sent through the postal system!
This must be made a thing of the past, AND SOON.

Information needed by other departmens that requires transfer between buildings distance apart can only go by a few methods. one is if required personel hand to hand .If this fails then the contractor employed to supply this service is directly to blame for the failure if a failure has taken place in the delivery and any resulting costs incured by the coustomer due to this failure should be meet by the contractor. How can the people who employed this contractor be held resposable when there is no secure network beetween some of the goverment departments and if there is why did a request for hard copies take place?