It was recently reported that HMRC had drawn up plans to share taxpayers’ personal data with private firms. If the plan goes ahead, it would mean the release of tax data to private businesses, researchers and public bodies. The data would be made available anonymously.
However, David Davis the former Conservative minister has publicly described the plans as “borderline insane”. A final decision has yet to be taken and HMRC has said that it would respect people’s confidentiality.
Davis Says It: ‘Defies logic’
The Guardian newspaper said that HMRC were looking into a number of “charging options”; this suggests that firms will be expected to pay for data access. Public concern has already been raised and comparisons drawn with the Care.data initiative. The scheme for anonymous sharing of NHS medical records has been suspended due to fears of precisely what information would be shared.
Treasury minister David Gauke is overseeing the project; plans to relax data-sharing laws with regard to HMRC information were first drawn up in July last year but “further consultations” will take place according to the organisation.
“The officials who drew this up clearly have no idea of the risks to data in an electronic age. Our forefathers put these checks and balances in place when the information was kept in cardboard files, and data was therefore difficult to appropriate and misuse. It defies logic that we would remove those restraints at a time when data can be collected by the gigabyte, processed in milliseconds and transported around the world almost instantaneously,” Mister Davis went on to explain.
Emma Carr of Big Brother Watch, said: “The ongoing claims about anonymous data overlook the serious risks to privacy of individual level data being vulnerable to re-identification. Given the huge uproar about similar plans for medical records, you would have hoped HMRC would have learned that trying to sneak plans like this under the radar is not the way to build trust or develop good policy.”
Tony Shanks