The Irish Times is one of the leading daily newspapers in Ireland. It was also one of the first with a website (www.ireland.com) in the 1990s and has taken the courageous step (in the face of Irish libel laws) of letting selected columnists write blogs as extensions of their regular print columns.
One of my personal favourites is Shane Hegarty. Shane recently blogged about various scandals of lost or misplaced personal information including the debacle of the UK’s Revenue service sticking 25 million person records on 2 cds and promptly losing them in the post. As he is a professional journalist, the piece is well written and informative so we thought we’d share it with you as a Trainwreck Compendium.
Here’s the link to Shane Hegarty’s article, which also appeared in print in the Irish Times.
What made me chuckle about this particular disaster was that, following the loss of the CD-ROMs, a letter was sent out to all those in the database, in the name of the chairman of HMRC, Paul Hartnett, apologising for the loss of their national insurance and child benefit details, which could be used by identity fraudsters.
This letter was then followed by the advice that the apology letter needed to be disposed of carefully, as it contained, yes, the person’s national insurance and child benefit details, which could be used by identity fraudsters.
Magnificent!
Graham – at least it shows they understand recursion….
“To apologise about the screw up you must first apologise about the screw up”.