The current government’s asset stripping of the British state has now moved onto HMRC, according to an article in yesterday’s Guardian. To quote directly from the Guardian piece:
The personal financial data of millions of taxpayers could be sold to private firms under laws being drawn up by HM Revenue & Customs in a move branded “dangerous” by tax professionals and “borderline insane” by a senior Conservative MP.
The senior Conservative MP in question is David Davis, who has taken a particular interest in civil liberties in recent years. According to The Guardian, Davis has said:
“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.”
Outside Parliament, the Open Rights Group is campaigning against the madness that has afflicted the taxman. According to ORG, the use of personal data without consent is meant to be against data protection laws, so what are the Information Commissioner and Data Protection Registrar doing about this proposed flagrant breach of data protection legislation?
In the meantime, the ORG has set up a petition to which you can add your name. The petition reads as follows:
I call on the government to halt plans to sell personal tax data to private companies and researchers. Please don’t sell our private financial information to companies. Anonymisation is not foolproof and it is my right to object to my information being shared in this way.
Any access to my personal information held by the government should only be given after my explicit personal consent.
I have. My financial data submitted to HMRC is meant for them alone, not to be sold to the highest bidder, even in allegedly ‘anonymised’ format.