HMRC London Office

HM Revenues & Customs, a government department has apologized to the eligible tax credit claimants for a serious data breach incident due to which personal information of over 50,000 people was exposed.The story was first broken over by The Register as they received a tip from one of their readers. Apparently, the reader had received a tax credit notice that contained details of two other recipients’ work, childcare and pay details.

In response, Paul Gerrard, the director of tax credits at HMRC, apologised for the error. HMRC issued a response which said, “HMRC takes data security extremely seriously. Unfortunately an error has occurred in one of the tax credits print runs causing some customer information to be wrongly formatted. Investigations are underway to identify the cause of the problem and we will be contacting affected customers in writing this week, apologising and providing a corrected award notice. An initial analysis shows that ID theft could not result from this printing error.”

While the number of tax credit notices dispatched are not exactly clear, it is believed that around 50,000 tax credit notices were dispatched.

Owen Roberts from Callcreditcheck.com (an organization monitoring customer accounts for ID fraud) mentioned, “HMRC’s claim that this isn’t enough to commit ID fraud is only half-true. It could be enough for the beginnings of a path to fraud, or the icing on the cake for a potential fraudster.”

In a similar incident two-and-half years ago, the confidential details of 25 million Child Benefit claimants were burnt on two unencrypted CDs and popped in post. Infact last year, the department at HMRC had also indicated good progress in removing the ability to transfer data to USB sticks and CDs with the exception of compelling business cases.

Many people are of the opinion that printing was outsourced to some third party company who were expected to do a proper job but instead they messed up the situation.

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