Printing error causes new HMRC data breach

HMRC has apologised for a data security breach in which tax credit claimants received other people’s personal information.

The Register website broke the story after a reader alerted them to a tax credit notice that contained details of two other recipients’ work, childcare and pay details.

A few days later, a letter arrived by HMRC director of tax credits Paul Gerrard apologising for the error and including a stamped, addressed envelope for the claimant to return the misprinted notice.

HMRC commented: "HMRC takes data security extremely seriously. Unfortunately an error has occurred in one of the tax credits print runs causing some customer information to be wrongly formatted. Investigations are underway 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. An initial analysis shows that ID theft could not result from this printing error."

According to The Register, 50,000 tax credit notices had been dispatched, but HMRC was not able to confirm how many had been misformatted.

The latest data mishap revives memories of the incident in November 2007 when the confidential details of 25 million Child Benefit claimants went missing on two CDs. Chairman Paul Gray resigned over the breach and an enquiry headed by PwC senior partner Keiran Poynter subsequently put forward 45 recommendations to address the department’s data protection weakspots.