back to article Revenue pledges data 2011

HMRC's latest report reveals the department hopes to have fully implemented the recomendations of the Poynter review into data security by June 2011. Kieran Poynter of PWC was appointed to review procedures after the Revenue transferred 25 million people's child benefit records onto two unencrypted discs and popped them in the …


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  1. Anonymous Coward

    Well, progress is progress?

    But government funded things tend to operate on:

    - first we identify a framework of duties, responsibilities and personnel. Budget it then implement it.

    - secondly we meet the targets now that the framework is in place.

    There (usually) is no conception that changes can be implemented straight away without need for a budgeted framework?

  2. Paul Donnelly
    Paris Hilton

    Data Security.....

    ....... We'll implement it by the time we're out of government for incompetence.

    Good Skills Labour! If only the electorate had a long enough memory to remember the last 10 years of Labours 'Good Times' culminating in the greatest economic disaster of my lifetime..... after the conservatives have had a go at cocking it up.

    Paris, because I'd honestly rather have her as Prime Minister than incompetent Brown

  3. Will Godfrey Silver badge

    You couldn't make it up

    People used to think 'Yes Minister' was just comedy - It's reality!

  4. Martin Lyne

    It's a business plan.

    They're storing all their data in "THE CLOUD!"™. It's backed up on thousands of criminals computers, all over the world, and can be recovered with a quick and simple police raid/hack attack!

  5. Anonymous Cowherd

    Tag this in a long list of stories

    Starting out with heroic optimism, drifting through delays 'which will shortly be rectified', through to eventual, inevitable waving of the white flag.

    If this project can do what for the Revenue what prior projects have done for the Child Support Agency then I'm delighted to support this one-off waste of my tax money to cripple their ability to take anymore.

  6. Graham Marsden

    data security... by 2011

    And porcine aviation by 2012!

  7. John Robson Silver badge
    Black Helicopters


    Why are they so inept?

    I can't imagine that anyone with enough brain power to put on their own underwear would think that a 4 year cycle for a security review is just ridiculous.

  8. Anonymous Coward

    An alternative view... that 2011 is safely past the next election, and as Poynter is a work-in-progress, we won't be able to say there's still an issue about data security until it's all been sorted.

  9. William Old
    Gates Horns

    Impossible without standards...

    ... and HMRC can't even meet basic open standards, e.g. RFC2822 for e-mail.

    Just try entering a perfectly legal e-mail address containing an ampersand (&) in the local part into one of their systems, and see what happens... you can happily swap e-mails with HMRC using that address (isn't the Internet kind?), but (Microsoft) GovTalk bans them. They're frightened that their Windows systems will fall over with fright at the thought of entering such heinous data into HMRC records as your e-mail address... :-(

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