Mix, match and send credit details to whoever
That’s what HM Revenue & Customs seems to be doing these days. They have taken the credit details of over 50,000 individuals claiming tax credits and mistakenly sent them out in the post. The result was that each one of the claimants has received their annual tax credit award notice, along with the private details of someone else.
Yearly earnings, parts of bank accounts, insurance numbers and names have all been sent out randomly to claimants. Yet the HMRC claims they will apologize and no IT theft could have resulted from this!
“Unfortunately an error has occurred in one of the tax credits print runs, causing some customer information to be wrongly formatted,” said a spokeswoman.
“Investigations are under way 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.”
Let’s hope that all claimants are moral, law abiding citizens and that the information is indeed to little to be used in any wrongful way! Yet the apology is still in order and a thorough analysis should follow the initial one that stated there were no ID theft risks!
