The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Revenue pledges data security...by 2011

Anonymous Coward

Well, progress is progress? 

Stop

But government funded things tend to operate on:

- first we identify a framework of duties, responsibilities and personnel. Budget it then implement it.

- secondly we meet the targets now that the framework is in place.

There (usually) is no conception that changes can be implemented straight away without need for a budgeted framework?

Paul Donnelly

Data Security..... 

Paris Hilton

....... We'll implement it by the time we're out of government for incompetence.

Good Skills Labour! If only the electorate had a long enough memory to remember the last 10 years of Labours 'Good Times' culminating in the greatest economic disaster of my lifetime..... after the conservatives have had a go at cocking it up.

Paris, because I'd honestly rather have her as Prime Minister than incompetent Brown

Will Godfrey

You couldn't make it up 

Unhappy

People used to think 'Yes Minister' was just comedy - It's reality!

Martin Lyne

It's a business plan. 

They're storing all their data in "THE CLOUD!"™. It's backed up on thousands of criminals computers, all over the world, and can be recovered with a quick and simple police raid/hack attack!

Anonymous Cowherd

Tag this in a long list of stories 

Starting out with heroic optimism, drifting through delays 'which will shortly be rectified', through to eventual, inevitable waving of the white flag.

If this project can do what for the Revenue what prior projects have done for the Child Support Agency then I'm delighted to support this one-off waste of my tax money to cripple their ability to take anymore.

Graham Marsden

data security... by 2011 

Coat

And porcine aviation by 2012!

John Robson

Muppets 

Black Helicopters

Why are they so inept?

I can't imagine that anyone with enough brain power to put on their own underwear would think that a 4 year cycle for a security review is just ridiculous.

Anonymous Coward

An alternative view... 

Flame

...is that 2011 is safely past the next election, and as Poynter is a work-in-progress, we won't be able to say there's still an issue about data security until it's all been sorted.

William Old

Impossible without standards... 

Gates Horns

... and HMRC can't even meet basic open standards, e.g. RFC2822 for e-mail.

Just try entering a perfectly legal e-mail address containing an ampersand (&) in the local part into one of their systems, and see what happens... you can happily swap e-mails with HMRC using that address (isn't the Internet kind?), but (Microsoft) GovTalk bans them. They're frightened that their Windows systems will fall over with fright at the thought of entering such heinous data into HMRC records as your e-mail address... :-(