In the court of public opinion – or at least the one currently being run by the BBC, the fiasco over the catastrophic loss of personal data for 25 million citizens now stands at 4,809 comments. Even the so called A-list bloggers would struggle to get that level of reaction to an event that is bound to have significant repercussions across many government sponsored IT projects.
Mike Krigsman has catalogued some of the recent HMRC disasters. It’s not pretty reading. This time it has struck a nerve with the public. That matters because as one reader says:
I can only echo the sentiments of everyone else. How can we possibly trust this government with anything anymore? The size of this blunder can’t be under-estimated, this is 25 million people we’re talking about, almost half the population!!
Surely no one can have any confidence left in this government and its ability to fulfil its primary obligation, which is to protect the citizens of this country.
Like it or not, we have come to rely on IT in many aspects of our lives. When government gets something wrong as basic as the transmission of data from one department to another, then you have to be concerned about IT governance. In this case, it would appear to count for very little.
This is particularly worrying for professionals who have already endured continuing problems with online filing. Perhaps now is the time for HMRC to step back and evaluate what’s really going on. These kinds of failure in process and quality cannot be allowed to continue ad infinitum.
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