Darling´s database disaster

The person I feel sorry for is poor little Joe Bloggs, the junior official in HMRC who originally despatched the computer disks to the National Audit Office.

We can assume that he would have been in the finance section of the department, as the function of dealing with the NAO is jealously guarded by finance sections throughout the government; administrative branches are not permitted to send off material to NAO without finance section approval. Mr Bloggs would normally have dealt with maintaining the databases and spreadsheets supporting the financial processes of estimating, monitoring and accounting for child benefit expenditure. His limited exposure to the people end of the business would have meant that his awareness of the procedures for dealing with personal data might not have been all that it should be - indeed chances are that he has only been with the department for about six months and has yet to attend all the required training courses.

So came the fateful day when his boss told him to send a copy of the entire database to the NAO - and by close of play that afternoon please. Mr B did what he had always done when NAO wanted financial projections or draft accounts; he downloaded the material onto disks, dumped them in a padded envelope, addressed it and threw it in the out tray. Of course he should have known that, unlike his usual material, the child benefits database incorporated personal data which demanded greater security. But, well, he had neither the time nor the inclination to think about it.

Ironically, the NAO did not actually need the entire database - who has time to look through millions of records? All they needed was a sample (a very small sample). Typically of NAO, they would not trust the HMRC to select that sample; they had to do it themselves. They could have sent a couple of auditors up from London to Tyne and Wear to carry out this task. But that´s a tedious (and expensive) journey. Far easier to tell HMRC to send them the whole lot by post.

Meanwhile, as half a million civil servants mutter under their breath "There but for the grace of God ...", poor Joe Bloggs has been incarcerated in the dungeons under the Treasury where he will shortly suffer ritual hanging drawing and quartering. He will be forever known as the man who lost the personal records of half the nation´s population.

Shit happens. It shouldn´t but it does.