Banks accuse HMRC of breach of duty |
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| Thursday, 29 November 2007 | |
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HM Revenue and Customs breached its duty of care in dealing with its customers over the recent loss of their personal data, the British Bankers’ Association has said. Finance professionals attended the BBA’s fifth annual conference on financial crime to learn the latest techniques to counter the fraud and money laundering which finances much of the world's organised crime. BBA Chief Executive Angela Knight said that the banks are not crime fighters but do fight crime regularly and effectively. By cutting off the funding of organised crime by stopping large-scale frauds and money laundering schemes, the banks say they prevent major crimes at the very first stages of their development. Law enforcement She pointed out that financial crime does not feature in the list of priorities the police has been given by the Home Office. The BBA said that banks need more support to be more effective and urgently need the government to make fraud and financial crime a priority for law enforcement. "Few can have failed to recognise that the millions and millions of individuals personal financial data that was lost by the HMRC not only has taken some weeks for them to report to those who need to know - the individuals and the banks -, but that it is a breach of duty of care which would not be countenanced in the private sector," Knight added. She said that the BBA has informed HMRC that the banks will be looking for recompense should any bank suffer financial loss as a consequence. Unacceptable lack of data protection "Looking at the wider context in which this unacceptable lack of sensible data protection took place, it is clear that government has not yet accepted properly the case for making fraud and financial crime a priority for law enforcement in its own right,” Knight said. Given the proven links between financial crime and other types of criminality, such as drugs and people trafficking and terrorism, the banks argue that the police's performance framework has to have financial crime as a high agenda item. The BBA claims that resources allocated by government to law enforcement to tackle both money laundering and fraud risks are on the decline. Knight said that efforts to reduce fraud and money laundering are essential, not just because it flags the UK as a good place to do business, but also because it cuts off the funding for other types of criminality and threats. "It is quite extraordinary that the industry does so much on anti-money laundering, on fraud prevention and on identifying suspicious transactions, and yet this doesn’t feature among the priorities the police has been given by the Home Office," Knight concluded. Related articles |
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