By Andy McCue, 16 December 2005 14:00
NEWS
The government has said it still does not know the full extent of the tax credits ID fraud that has so far resulted in 13,000 benefits staff having their personal details stolen and used to make false claims.
That theft of the personal details of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) staff has to date resulted in £15m lost in fraudulent claims and led to the online tax credits service being closed down completely on 2 December ahead of a full criminal investigation.HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) executive director David Varney told MPs at a Public Accounts Committee meeting this week that the online tax credits claim service had been targeted by "virulent" organised criminal gangs from the first day it was launched in 2003.
He told the MPs this latest ID fraud appears to have come from criminals using a list of staff details leaked by an insider at the DWP, which according to BBC News is from DWP payroll records from the 2003-04 financial year.
Varney also admitted other similar lists could also be in the hands of fraudsters but said HMRC is still "at a very early stage of knowing what the extent of this fraud is", according to the BBC News website.
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1. anonymous
This case undelines the fact that one of the biggests security exposures lies not from without, but from within an organisation, and that in any government system used to control and administer payments to the general public, there will always be significant threats from those who would seek to abuse such systems, hoping, no doubt, that the sheer size of the system and volumes of transactions being processed will cover their tracks.
Worryingly, this is but one case where security of a government-controlled IT system has been severly compromised. I wonder just how many other security breaches have there been that the public have not been told of? Can we now have any confidence in any ID card system that this or future governments want to impose on us? The constitutional issues aside, the fact that we must sometimes need to use a number of different items in proving our address, etc., is the greatest security we can have: consolidation onto a single system is the greatest threat.