Without question, the doyen of the Whitehall farce from 1944 to 1969 was Baron Bryan Rix (made a life peer for his tireless work for the mentally handicapped).  But he had the wisdom to appear at the Whitehall theatre, and deliberately set out to entertain and delight his customers.

The twists and turns of another Whitehall farce, in this case starring Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and the National Audit Office(NAO), in what is about to become the long running Child Benefit Data Farce, can now be seen onstage at the BBC (and any number of other entertainment purveyors).

Sadly, these jokers appear to lack all the skills of the Baron Rix.  They do not entertain and delight their audience either.  It did not appear to concern them that there are laws (the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, and the Data Protection Act 1998) that have to be considered before processing data. 

If we are to believe http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7108532.stm then the only concerns shown by all concerned were to save a few pounds (30 to buy some decent encryption software) and to skimp on proper delivery controls (it seems that HMRC don’t know what courier they used, or even if the courier ever got the missing CDs) – and, just for fun, it seems that at least 6 CDs have vanished and not just the two they first mentioned. 

Ah, now it sounds much more like the traditional farce.  In the Rix farces, every time one of the main characters walks onstage some new disaster that was hidden from us is now revealed.  And any additional characters are unwillingly dragged into a doom not of their own making.  It seems that the NAO thought it was OK to regularly send all the data to their own auditors because NAO didn’t have the computer power needed to do their own audit work (?) and that was OK because the auditors were a ‘long standing strategic partner.’  To be scrupulous, the NAO did ask HMRC to remove unnecessary data, but HMRC refused, and so it’s all ‘their’ fault that the disks had unnecessary data. 

The HMRC web site makes the following statement about their exemptions from the Data Protection Act: “
• Section 29 ‘crime and taxation’
• Section 35 ‘disclosures required by law or in connection with legal proceedings’.
The application of exemptions is quite complex and if you require further information or assistance you should seek further guidance.” 

Well, now that’s quite clear, since we are entitled, as a matter of fact, to understand that what is listed publicly are truly the most important exemptions, and that all others are minor and trivial because if they were not then they should have been made just as clear.  This is the same argument as is used in contract law, that if something is so important that you have to rely upon it in a Court of Law, then you must have made it utterly clear in the agreement, not hidden it away deep in some small print.

But back to the plot.

So the NAO figure they are not responsible for their own actions of distributing disks that contained data that were not necessary for a specified business purpose, because it was not their data.  It was the HMRC data.  They gave us data we didn’t ask for so there was nothing wrong in us giving it to other people.   Maybe there is going to be a glorious moment when Basil Fawlty walks on stage and tells us, “We were only obeying orders.”  Or maybe that’s in Act 2.  Thank goodness I booked triple drinks for the interval.

Now OK, maybe you think I am being a bit harsh.  But if you ever ask government for information about anything, the very first question is, “Who needs to know?”  That is the bedrock of handling classified information.  So why is it that UK government departments seem to have such a casual indifference when handling the personal (and, given what we know about threats such as identity theft) sensitive data of some 25 million people (not quite half the country in round terms).  Well, in the true sense of farce, if there were not some things that are completely impossible to explain, or completely defy any form of logic, then farce would not work.

I guess if you didn’t have a classical education you might miss the subtle difference between farce and tragedy.  Ask any Greek.  The difference is the number of dead at the end of the play.  But if governments run true to form there will be no shortage of sacrificial goats. 

The really sad part of the whole play (remember, Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely Players.”) is that the people actually at risk are, on the one hand, the people claiming child benefit, and on the other hand the taxpayer (because they are the real lender of last resort to any and every government).  When the Northern Rock hit a hard place the British taxpayer picked up the bill.  So much for the moral risk.

Now maybe (or most likely) the people inside governments are too overcome with their own self-importance to notice that they are also taxpayers, or maybe they have inflation proof pensions, so they really don’t care about the implications of what they do, because they, uniquely, are where no amount of incompetence can harm them.  In any event, you should be saying that only those who can be personally harmed by their decisions should be allowed to make decisions. 

So maybe that’s what the farce is.  That really big organizations behave as if they are either outside or above the law, and have deep enough pockets that all they have to fear is press exposure, because nothing else can really harm them.  And the tragedy is that public confidence continues to fall as electors see that governments serve themselves and not their electorates.  Perhaps the Greeks were right after all?