... the best thing about these repeated data loss stories, is that it shows the government up for being the Inspector Clueseo of the IT world. It's patently clear that "Government IT expertise" is an oxymoron.

If the fear of being caught defrauding the system, because of all the expensive IT systems which would catch me was 50% last year, it's 5% now.

The fact that CDs need to be posted round the country shows :

1) There's no central data store

2) Government computer systems are clearly incompatible

3) There's no platform-indepedent govenment network

at the end of the day, it would have been more secure to fax copies around, or use a point-to-point dial-up FTP package (ISTR ProComm) - I'm sure you can still get copies of KERMIT for Windows.