British Government Loses 25 Million Child Benefit Records

A junior goverment worker is blamed for losing 25 million records including names, addresses, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers and other related information in late October.

The entire child benefit database was sent via internal mail by courier on October 18th.. The civil servant had disregarded rules by downloading the data to disk and sending the unencrypted data by unrecorded delivery. The loss was not disclosed until a month later in hopes that the disks would be located. A twenty-three year old worker has since resigned.

…a spectacular blunder that left nearly half the population’s confidential records inexplicably lost in the mail.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling told a stunned Parliament that a copy of the private records of the 25 million Britons who receive child-benefit payments had vanished.

Darling said two data discs containing records for 7.25 million families — including names, addresses, dates of birth and bank-account details — were missing due to a “huge, massive, unforgivable mistake.”

The result for the victims is uncertainty of fraud for many years to come, as well as increased mistrust in the government’s ability to protect sensitive information.

Related Links:

• British government on ropes as confidential records lost
• How papers see records data loss
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• More articles about careless organizations that allow data to be stolen…