called2account

Wednesday

Eevryone’s at it

1 Comment August 27, 2008 – 7:54 am | Share and Save | Permalink |  Print This Post |

We heard extraordinary clamour about the inefficiency of HM Revenue & Customs when it lost data about child benefit claimants last year. The data in question was pretty innocuous. Knowing a person’s bank account number is rarely sufficient information to enable someone to steal their identity.

Now the private sector (let’s be specific: the Royal Bank of Scotland and associates) has lost data on about a million people. This includes signatures, account names and passwords and other such useful stuff that could have left vast numbers of people seriously exposed. It could have wiped the bank out if it had got into the wrong hands.

People said they could no longer trust HMRC as a result of its much less serious error. They said tax should be simplified to make sure this could never happen again. They wanted child benefit payments abolished. There was no limit to the hue and cry. The HM Revenue & Customs chairman quit.

And what will happen because of RBS’s mistake (because be sure, it is their mistake: their contractor did it just as surely as HMRC’s contractor actually lost the disk)?

Nothing, I suspect. No one will quit. No one will say we should ban the use of credit cards, or go back to manual ledgers, or stop the use of computers in banking.

And let’s be clear why that is. No one was really that bothered by HMRC’s mistake. No one lost anything as a result of it. There was little chance they could have done. But a lot of people did want to make political capital out of it to undermine the tax system and HMRC in particular.

Now their deceit is exposed can we ignore their cries of anguish next time something like this happens?