HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

The personal financial data of millions of taxpayers could be sold to private firms under laws being drawn up by HM Revenue & Customs in a move branded "dangerous" by tax professionals and "borderline insane" by a senior Conservative MP.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...taxpayers-data

Not a good idea in my mind after the debacles of the Government's plan to share "anonymised" medical records with third parties.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

'Could' being the operative word. It's a proposal and a pretty stupid one IMHO, given the string of high profile failures (technical, security and otherwise) which often seem to characterise such projects.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Should this ever become a reality i think it inevitable that HMRC will cock it up ,also ,will we ever know they are doing it or will we find out in 5yrs time when someone leaves a removable drive on a train

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Why not start with a trial, of say 650 certain people, run that for say 5 years and see how it goes.

Government + IT = total disaster

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Fixed that for you.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Somehow I think if our glorious leaders were required to be part of the testing of all new rules, regulations, systems etc., there'd be rather less appetite for change amongst them and what change there was would be far better thought through.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

HMRC wouldn't bother anyway they only want to sell tax payers details ;)

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Fantastic idea. What could go wrong?

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Mind you HMRC already lost the personal details of 25m child benefit claimants so maybe there's not much else to lose...

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

How does this idea square with the Data Protection Act? Mind you, with the Political parties we have nowadays nothing should really surprise us.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

It's supposed to be anonymised and aggregated, with no actual personally identifying information......

Supposed to be.....

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

IIRC the same was said about the GP data but I was briefly listening to a discussion about that today and someone was saying that it can still be linked to individuals/addresses. Not sure how but something to do with postcodes I think.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

As with care.data there will be a date if birth and a postcode as part of the anonymised data. Likely to be only one person in a postcode with a particular date of birth. Easy to identify a person cross referencing with another database.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Thats why i informed my Doctor that i do not want my information passed on.

Re: HMRC to sell taxpayers' financial data
 

Is this wrong IMO YES ..
Does it surprise me NO ..