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Economy

PwC chairman to head data probe

Thursday, 22 November 2007

PricewaterhouseCooper’s chairman Kieran Poynter will conduct an independent review into data security after HM Revenue & Customs lost the details of 25 million individuals.

Poynter, a senior partner at the Big Four firm and one of the UK’s highest paid accountants, was approached by Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday to look into the circumstances that made it possible for a junior official to download and post the entire child benefit database repeatedly.

He will post an interim report in December and final recommendations on how to improve data protection in the public sector next spring.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) on Wednesday called for such a full independent inquiry into how HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) managed to lose the confidential details of 25 million child benefit claimants.

Frank Haskew, Head of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, said that as the person carrying the ultimate responsibility for HMRC, Paul Gray had taken the honourable course in resigning, but that changing the chairman will not address the real issues that this raises.

"It is inevitable that searching questions will now be asked about the origins of this problem and we suspect that the answer is likely to be deep rooted and point to the need for a much wider reform of HMRC’s management and operational practices,” he added.

He said he was concerned that cost-cutting pressures had caused serious operational problems. The ICAEW called on HMRC and government urgently to rethink the approach to service delivery and what operational changes are needed to ensure that problems such as this do not recur.

Haskew added that although the loss concerned the personal data of individuals, it could equally have been business data.

"If HMRC cannot reassure everyone with whom they deal that they really can keep confidential data secure in future, then the inevitable result will be that people and businesses will stop providing it to them wherever possible. That is why an independent inquiry is so necessary, even though that will take time to set up and report,” he concluded.

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