Saturday, January 26, 2008

"Bad Apples" at HMRC

What is Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) doing to identify and remove staff that cannot be trusted to maintain the confidentiality of taxpayers' records?

"The system is secure. We do trust our own people but as with all things there are bad apples" - HMRC spokesman.

If online filing is not good enough for MPs or VIPs, why is it good enough for the rest of us!?!

5 comments:

wonkotsane said...

They employ 110,000 people, with that number of employees you're bound to get the odd bad one. Still, if there is a database or online service that we are forced to use then everyone should be forced to use it, even MPs and famous people. If it's good enough for us it's good enough for them.

Anonymous said...

Not sure why anything we enter on HMRC websites is especially sensitive anyway. So someone finds out I earned x and had expenses of y. Who cares?

Snafu said...

Xoggoth, and that your national insurance number is 'z' and your bank account is 't'. The potential for fraud is high..

Wonko, if you think you're bound to have a "few bad apples", how many bad apples will eventually have access to your medical records given that there are 1.3m NHS workers!

PS Xoggoth, different tax schedules, ie schedule A or schedule D, were originally introduced so that no one would know how much you earned in total!

Anonymous said...

¨So someone finds out I earned x and had expenses of y. Who cares?¨

Too right, who cares!

So, what is your national insurance number?
Tell us your name.
Tell us your postal address.
Tell your tax code.
Tell us your gross earnings.

are you claiming benefits for any reason? Tell us that too.

Any other normally private information you don´t care about you would like to broadcast to all and sundry too?

Credit card number, bank account and sort code?

No, nobody cares.

Anonymous said...

Oh yeh, forgot about the NI number and the bank details (although personally I never put those in)

Ideally, I would like a really secure system that prevents HMRC knowing my earnings.