Officials warn of potential fraud alert amongst UK families
November 27, 2007 by admin
Filed under News, News-Loans
According to a recent report many UK families with children aged under sixteen have been placed on fraud alert after it was revealed that HM Revenues and Customs have lost two discs containing data on all families in the UK with children aged under sixteen, with a range of other related details.
This comes just weeks after it was revealed that discs containing pension details and personal details of pension customers with Standard Life had gone astray, and HMRC and Standard Life had to contact customers to put them on alert.
The data on the latest discs that have gone missing related to child benefit, and amongst the details thought to be contained on the discs are names, addressed, national insurance numbers, dates of birth, and in some cases bank account details. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, stated that there was nothing to say that the discs had fallen into the hands of criminals, but he did warn families to be vigilant to avoid becoming the victims of fraud.
Mr Darling made an emergency statement to MPs relating to the issue, and stated: “The missing information contains details of all Child Benefit recipients: records for 25 million individuals and 7.25 million families. ”
He also expressed his own disappointment with what had happened, apologizing for the situation and stated that the incident was an “extremely serious failure on the part of HMRC to protect sensitive personal data entrusted to it in breach of its own guidelines”.
He told MPs: “Two password protected discs containing a full copy of HMRC’s entire data in relation to the payment of child benefit was sent to the NAO, by HMRC’s internal post system operated by the courier TNT. The package was not recorded or registered. It appears the data has failed to reach the addressee in the NAO.”
Tom Smith
27th November 2007
