Mistakes, far too frequent mistakes.

Credit card companies, for all they occasionally get stung by identity thieves tend to be very, very careful with their customers details, they don't put them on disks or sticks (encrypted or not) and they don't leave them on laptops in taxi's. Nor oddly enough do they post your details to someone else. Yet the civil service of this country seem to have no qualms whatsoever about doing this to all and sundry.

BBC.

The private financial details of up to 50,000 people who claim tax credits have been mistakenly sent out in the post by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

Claimants were sent their annual tax credit award notice, along with personal details of other claimants.

One woman from Hyde in Greater Manchester has told the BBC her letter included her neighbour's earnings.

She also got the bank sort code and the last four digits of the bank account number of another claimant.

The HMRC said it would be apologising to all the people affected.

"Unfortunately an error has occurred in one of the tax credits print runs causing some customer information to be wrongly formatted," said a spokeswoman.

"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," she said.

No doubt, "Lessons will be learned™" and no doubt it will happen again and again at least until they start sacking some people (complete with civil service union strikes and no doubt SWP solidarity rioting during negotiations) The problem is that the public sector through various means have managed to disconnect action from reaction, there are rarely consequences to their actions and never dismissals for actions that in the private sector would do so possibly with criminal proceedings. Until the realisation gets to the civil service that "heads will roll" should people's data be treat with respect and security then I expect the Cameron/Clegg coalition to be irritated by these scandals on a regular basis.

Simply not good enough no longer works with me for this sort of thing.