Senior officials now in frame for HMRC data fiasco
Union says security crisis should mean job cut halt
What you need to know about cloud backup
UK Identity Crisis Senior officials were involved in the decision to post the UK's child benefit database on unencrypted CDs, it emerged overnight.
Sir John Bourn, head of the National Audit Office, said decisions were made at a higher level and that the NAO asked for the data be "desensitised" but this was rejected on grounds of expense. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs sent 25m records on two unencrypted CDs three times; the second envelope never arrived at the National Audit Office and is still missing.
As the scandal broke earlier this week, government spinners insisted that the error was down to a junior official at the Washington, Tyne and Wear office, acting well outside their remit.
But Bourn yesterday told a secret session of the Public Accounts Committee that it was a senior manager at HMRC authorised the release of the data and that his email on the data sharing was cc'd to an assistant director.
The Tories described the data loss disaster as evidence of "systemic failure, not individual error by a junior official".
A spokeswoman for HMRC said: "We have no comment to make on individual officials. There is a police investigation ongoing so we cannot comment."
A junior official from the Child Benefit IT department has reportedly been suspended and sent to a nearby hotel with a minder in order to protect his or her identity.
Unions, meanwhile, have simultaneously slammed the scapegoating of a junior member of staff and blamed the government for stretching HMRC to breaking point.
The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said in a statement that the government's determination to slash 25,000 jobs within the next five years had placed a huge strain on resources.
Since March 2005 the PCS said that the government had made 13,000 job cuts at HMRC with a further 12,500 planned by 2011.
It said: "With additional security checks expected to be put in place for people claiming and making enquiries about Child Benefit we urge the government to put extra resources into HMRC rather than continuing with cutting jobs."
PCS union rep Graham Steel, who has been in talks with the HMRC over the ongoing job cuts on the Capgemini Aspire contract where up to 600 UK workers are expected to take compulsory redundancy, told El Reg that "it was only a matter of time before something went wrong."
He said that the chancellor's attempts to "save pennies" had seriously backfired.
"That's why we don't like seeing work off-shored. It raises all kinds of security issues about sensitive data and the worry is that it could get into the wrong hands."
Asked if the union would support the official at the centre of the data loss storm, Steel said that it was union policy to "represent them just the same as any other case."
Chancellor Alistair Darling also said yesterday that the disaster actually strengthened arguments in favour of ID cards. He rejected calls from the Tories that the government should think again. Darling also denied the recent merger of Revenue and Customs, and associated job losses, had anything to do with the disastrous data giveaway.
There's more from the Guardian here.®
COMMENTS
TNT
According to the BBC 6 more CDs are missing. These contain audio files of customer complaints. It seems that they were shipped by TNT but never arrived.
TNT apparently said "it was impossible to say whether the CDs had ever entered TNT's system."
Err Excuse me - are TNT a courier service or are they a bunch of cowboys. How can a courier company get into a situation where they cannot say if they've ever actually picked something up. Sounds like they are as useless as the person who decided to use them to ship confidential data. Remind me never to use them if they are so clueless
Maybe all these "lost" CDs are actually just sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting to be picked up?
URAC
Within the pdf the email dated/timed 13 March 2007 13:11 seems a bit strange - "I hope you make sense to you than us however".
But what is the URAC mentioned in that email? In context it appears to be record/field layout/descriptor but I've never seen that term before.
BTW When NAO state the HMRC Process Owner "was a copy recipient of an email", please note that they do not state he was ONLY CC'd on one email in the entire email exchange.
The last statement limits the Process Owner's involvement, but the first leaves involvement undefined while implying a limit. (I've read a lot of Civil Service reports.)
Steve, er, the other one, no, the first one, er...
Even if it's an antediluvian mainframe system, running off an extract dataset with just the fields you want should take a decent techie oh, all of five minutes.
No procedures to follow, no source code versioning, no compile even, if you're lucky, and certainly no testing required, just bash off a quick little number in SAS, or Easytrieve or whatever you have to hand, and bish bash bosh, loads 'a' data wiv the dodgy bits left aaht.
There are different ways of treating name & address data to avoid DPA issues, by the way.
The obvious way is to encrypt the stuff to death.
The less obvious way is to use a commercial software package that obfuscates specific fields with gobbledegook; point it at the names and it'll "intelligently" change them so it's no longer possible to identify the people involved, but to a human eye they are still obviously names of some sort. Point it at the addresses, and it'll do a similar job.
In this case, it seems the names needed to remain unchanged, but the bank details could have been discombobulated by software. Of course, setting up a run of this sort of software is less than trivial if you want to do a good job: I wonder if this is what was being quoted as "too expensive"?
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
