About two years ago I was asked to do a presentation on ‘Information Governance’ at a conference. Afterwards someone from HM Revenues and Customs came up to me and said ‘we’ve heard it all before’ and, this is so memorable, ‘you didn’t need to make a joke about the government’.

True. The government makes a good enough joke of themselves without my help. Particularly Alaistar Darling who is good at floundering around but not seemingly much else.

So two years on, its no surprise to read that the details of 25 million people, held on two unencrypted CDs, have been ‘lost in the post‘.

There are already acres of print (and the web equivalent about this) so here’s a summary:

  • Procedures were not followed
  • Barney, Varney and Gershwin have delivered a lot of job losses
  • Some of these lost jobs now seem to have been quite central to work operations
  • Now that the ‘Transformation agenda’ has been put under the spotlight, it’s not so clear what ‘transformation’ actually is -( does it actually mean transforming your data so that criminals can have it? )
  • No one trusts the government on ID cards
  • Nevertheless, ID cards are going ahead at huge cost
  • There is likely to be even more widespread fraud as a result of this (following on from Tax Credits fiasco)
  • It’s best to lie as much as possible on official forms