Don’t blame the Clerk

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that the Inland Revenue has lost in the post the data on all the 25 million people that receive child benefit. The part of the story that I was most alarmed about as it was reported yesterday was that a junior clerk had sent this information. What is alarming is that, if true as reported and I heard what Alistair Darling said, verbatim, that anyone in a junior position would be able to access all the records and to be able to copy them.

I refrained from calling this clerk all the stupid names he deserved to be called if it had been his fault, simply because knowing how people always try and avoid the blame when something goes wrong, was it really just a clerk that had done this.

Well today new information emerges. While the facts as reported were true, it was the facts that emerged late tonight that shows he was only carrying out instructions from above. It turns out that the National Audit Office requested that the data was stripped of anything that sensitive, this was refused by the revenue, on the grounds of cost. Also these emails asking for the information were copied to a person at director level, that fourth down the chain of command from the top, so the poor clerk who was being blamed for this was and is innocent.

It is interesting to note that the clerk, a young man of twenty-three, has been whisked away to a hotel to keep him away from the media. Oh how damaging his account will be.

In the UK we have to provide to various government bodies and departments all sorts of private and confidential information, we don’t have a choice. Therefore the government has to ensure that this data is secure. While I don’t agree with the paranoid people that say that no governments can be trusted, I don’t feel happy supplying any further information to any government department with this extremely poor level of data protection in place at the moment.