HMRC cock-up pt4; The Final Insult

[sci_starborne]

A week ago I called HMRC up to check how the mess was progressing, and got some interesting feedback.

• There’s no mention on my file about the incident OR there is and they’re not allowed to tell me because it would be an ongoing investigation; options that were both described to me over the telephone. and a spectacular exercise in fruitless paranoia generation.
• The cover-letter I included is probably now in a waiting list. This waiting list is currently 8 weeks long. Only at that point will my letter even be read.
• The person whose information I received would have been notified right away.

Tonight I finally got around to giving the person in question a quick phonecall to let them know the documents had been returned. They had NOT been informed. In fact they’d had to take it upon themselves to call HMRC to inform them.

Understandable since getting my call out of the blue, you’d want to be damn sure.

I mentioned the 8-week reply time, and they mentioned they’d been told the same thing. In other words HMRC wouldn’t have informed them about the mistake for over two months! Because they hadn’t gotten to it in their pile of post, despite being informed about it directly!

THIS is why you should have a separate department for security issues; because letting someone know their personal information has been leaked to the world requires a faster response than 1/6th of a year!

A dedicated address or department for urgent security issues is obvious for even small companies, yet somehow it seems to elude the management of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs who by law deal with the critical personal information of every single citizen of the UK!

So, presuming it’s not all an insane elaborate ruse and the department actually think the first act of someone actually out to misuse someones personal information would be to inform both that person and the department itself, then I can expect the next edition of this exciting and mind-bogglingly inept adventure to occur sometime around mid-to-late April.

Don’t hold your breath. I fully expect the attached documents to have gone “astray” in their to-do pile by then.

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.