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!
Revenue pledges data security...by 2011
HMRC's latest report reveals the department hopes to have fully implemented the recomendations of the Poynter review into data security by June 2011. Kieran Poynter of PWC was appointed to review procedures after the Revenue transferred 25 million people's child benefit records onto two unencrypted discs and popped them in the …
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Well, progress is progress?
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?
Data Security.....
....... 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
You couldn't make it up
People used to think 'Yes Minister' was just comedy - It's reality!
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.
Muppets
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.
An alternative view...
...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.
Impossible without standards...
... 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... :-(
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