Britain’s tax and customs service lost banking and personal data of 25 million people — nearly half the country’s population — when two computer disks disappeared in an internal mail service.
Paul Gray, the Revenue and Customs chairman, has resigned over the error, which happened when officials sent the disks to a government audit office. Treasury chief Alistair Darling said the delivery was not being tracked and was missing for three weeks before any alarm was raised.
You know, there’s casual – and then there’s STUPID!
The disks contained details on 7.25 million families in Britain claiming child benefit — a tax-free monthly payment available to everyone with children. The figure represents almost half the families in Britain, and the majority of the country’s children.
The information on the disks included the names of parents and children, their addresses, dates of birth, national insurance numbers and banking details.
Postman Pat would have delivered the mail, OK.
Surely they have a back up copy… don’t they?
The files only had a winzip password. no cypher.
JCD mentioned a while back that personal details like that are traded at something like $20 per lead. Maybe more.
That works out at a cool $500 million. !!! Yeah lets just stick those disks in a jiffy bag with a first class stamp on it. Security by obscurity.
This has got to be the heist of the year.
I forgot to add the best bit.
The governments advice to the 25 million people is to watch our bank accounts for unusual transactions.
The real story is: “a tax-free monthly payment
available to everyone with children.”
That’s right, go around complaining about global warming and pollution, and exhaustion of the world’s fisheries and deforestation, and so forth and then pay people for having children?
Where’s Scrooge when you need him?
And. In tonights news, the latest.
Seems that the culprit is getting a FULL pension, ALL his salary until retirement, and, it is reported a ‘generous’ financial leaving package.
What about starting a business called ‘FAILURES UNLIMITED’ There’s got to be money in it, after all, on the basis of the available evidence it should make fortunes. Bound to have many government Ministers wanting to join. oh, and civil servants (sorry, nearly forgot the founders of the principle).
Our government and institutions have been doing this regularly too. One wonders whether some people are lining their own pockets at 20 dollars a head. Or perhaps they have heavy investments in VeraChip that are not working out too well at the moment, who knows?
HHmmm so they are “lost”, not stolen, or in the hands of someone else? Seems like there are 25 million tax payers that arent anymore… 🙂