When will the guilty party be revealed to us?
Fraser Nelson 10:25pm
So where is the "junior official" who sent all the 25m record on two computer discs? What news of the British civil service's answer to Nick Leeson? Waiting for his Tory knighthood? In the Bahamas, collecting the £100m from the Hugo Drax of identity fraud? Or in a dungeon underneath No10 waiting for personal treatment from Mr Brown? He's being kept safe from wicked media in a hotel, apparently, hospitality of the Public and Commercial Services trade union (who may, who knows, flog him to the highest bidder this Sunday).
All this arouses suspicion from some quarters here in Westminster. The PCS is a little too active, it is being said - and are probably orchestrating the anonymous comments from people saying they are serving or former HMRC staff. The commentators' refrain is a variation on "what do you expect if Brown cuts a quarter of the staff? Pay peanuts, get monkeys". Now may be a clever smear operation, to devalue the horror stories I expect will unfold in the next few days. But this may yet turn into a dirty fight.
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J H Holloway
November 21st, 2007 10:50pm Report this commentR4 10pm news had a piece with Conservative spokesman who said that 'details' will be revealed tomorrow revealing that unencrypted data was being sent backwards and forwards for plain cost-cutting reasons. This had been happening since last March, if I remember rightly.
Lots more to come, true to NuLab spin form.
Nicholas Millman
November 22nd, 2007 12:14am Report this commentAnd Crick on Newsnight revealed that senior staff of HMRC were fully aware of the transactions with NAO. Brown's attempt during PMQ's to pillory the Conservatives for including HMRC cost-cutting in their manifesto well deserved Cameron's charge of "pathetic".
Verity
November 22nd, 2007 1:36am Report this commentWhat news of the British civil service's answer to Nick Leeson? A very commendable phrase. indeed.
Dave Bartlett
November 22nd, 2007 7:28am Report this commentThe FT have the same story
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/237eab00-9878-11dc-8ca7-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
It was a management decision, not a rogue clerk. Messrs Brown and Darling have been spinning again.
steve_roberts
November 22nd, 2007 8:37am Report this commentFact is, it's not the staff cuts which are the core problem. It's Brown's insane complexifying of the tax system over ten years which has made it unworkable and insupportably burdensome to its millions of "customers" ("victims" ?). This particular fiasco is just the symptom, if it hadn't happened, the system failure would have become public some other way.
Peter Petrelli
November 22nd, 2007 12:52pm Report this commentTax doesn't have to be taxing.. clearly not if applied to common sense in HMRC. Now you, Mr Joe Public, try and explain any innocent mistakes you might make and see what happens.....
Fergus Pickering
November 23rd, 2007 4:30am Report this commentOne section of the public who will continue to vote Labour, along with recipients of tax credits, invalidity benefit etc etc will be those who fail to declare great chunks of income on their tax returns, confident that the poor sods in the tax offices will never get around to digging sufficiently to uncover their depredations. Another way in which we are becoming more European? I have always understood that in Italy, for instance, it is considered eccentric or even immoral to file anything but the most fictional of tax returns. My mother, who knitted socks for the Spanish Republic, used to say that cheating on your tax was cheating the commonweal. Who would say that now? Witholding tax from this lot of spendthrift incompetents becomes a public duty. Of course I don't think like that, mother.
Anthony Hall
November 23rd, 2007 3:55pm Report this commentFergus, another sector sure to vote Labour is the army of civil servants with built in inflation proof pensions put into non-jobs by Brown and Blair in their efforts to build a permanent NuLab constituency. One (or more?) of them was responsible for the discs fiasco. Want to bet there will be nobody fired?
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