On a day when the biggest news in the UK is yet another almighty cock-up by our illustrious leaders, I have to say this - God, I am proud to be British.
For those of you who haven’t watched the news, or who don’t live in the ‘best country ever’ this is a brief summary of what happened.
To apply for benefits/welfare/whatever you want to call it - you have to fill in a form that is about 4000 pages thick and asks for every piece of information about yourself that you can think of (Question 962 - where did you go on holiday when you were 4, and what flavour, if any, ice cream did you eat?) including your name, address, date of birth and, oh yeah, your bank details. You know all that info you protect so that nasty identity thieves don’t get there hands on it and rip you off. If you are applying for benefits for your children all their information goes on the forms - you know the information that you wouldn’t want any bad men getting their hands on like their names, addresses and dates of birth.
All of this is recorded and kept on huge databases by the HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) who dole out (usually the wrong amount of) money and don’t check facts (this links to a video). These databases now contain the details of 25million people, approximately 7.25million families…
They were put onto a disk (well, presumably series of disks) and sent to another office by ‘normal’ post - not recorded in any way. They never arrived. They are in fact, what’s the word?
Genius.
Oh, it gets worse. So the details of 25million of your public are out there (granted on password protected disks but, oh, come on!) so what do you do?
You say nothing for 10 days…
Not a bloody word.
Great.
And they want to bring in ID Cards?! Most people, right now, are thinking that their government is crazy… We want a bloody election and we want it now!
In other news - Billie Piper (yes, Rose from Doctor Who) is up for a porn award!
And I leave you on that note…
- Amazing....
- Impressive?...
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Tags: billie piper, HMRC cock up, missing disks, News, porn award, secret diary of a call girl
November 21st, 2007 at 10:05 am
Watchdog did a programme on it on Monday…they’ve been sending loads of people’s details to the wrong people, giving out duplicate NI numbers…and the government declined to send someone on the show to talk about it. Typical…
November 21st, 2007 at 10:32 am
I agree wholeheartedly with the point about identity cards. The thing tat really irritates me about them is they are going to be compulsory yet we are all expected to pay £90 to get one. that sounds fair.
November 21st, 2007 at 1:24 pm
I like Martha Jones better.
November 21st, 2007 at 3:37 pm
I keep telling people that they can’t be trusted with all this info they’ve got on us all, but does anybody listen? Do they heck! Then everyone’s all surprised when they mislay 25 million people’s bank details.
Oh and the discs were actually posted back in October, it just took ‘em a couple o’ weeks to figure out something was up.
November 21st, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Jo - no-one showed up to gove their point of view? Always an admittance of guilt!
Dan - £90 to prove that you are who you say you are? That’s a deal at twice the price… Can you tell I’m being sarcastic?
Avitable - yes, and thank God she’s back for a few episodes next season… and in Torchwood too!
yorksdevil - where have you seen it said it was returned? Everywhere I’ve seen it’s said they were posted out once (unrecorded - disappeared) and then posted out again recorded (which arrived)…
November 22nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Who said anything about them being returned? The discs were posted on the 18th October* and as far as I’m aware haven’t been seen since.
*date found quickly on the bbc news website.
November 22nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
yorksdevil - “Oh and the discs were actually posted back in October,” - that’s what I thought you meant… sorry…
January 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
[...] Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t often say he is wrong. But today it happened. After the whole missing disks affair, by saying that no one could take money out of his account with that information, he published his [...]