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The rumours weren't true: the Poynter report wasn't the definitive explanation of HMRC's data breach that many had anticipated.
The six-page paper on the loss of CDs containing 25 million individuals' confidential details - written by PwC's Kieran Poynter - was, in fact, only an interim review and revealed little. (It can be downloaded in full by clicking the PDF link at the foot of this page).
The full report is expected early next year.
There were mixed reactions from within the tax world. The Public and Commercial Service Union, which represents members in Government departments and agencies, was among the most vocal.
It criticised the Government for attempting to deflect blame for the loss of the disks, and suggested that HMRC may have been unable to afford costs associated with filtering the missing child benefit data for the National Audit Office sample.
PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: 'Original attempts… to apportion blame on a junior official have been shown to be unacceptably pre-emptive, when we believe that their policies of cuts have been a major factor in this incident'.
Jerry Rihll, director of accountancy software house Digita, was equally strident: 'We all see that simple controls were supposed to be in place, but [they] were not operated for whatever reasons.
'The Government has pushed HMRC to combine the functions of paymaster and collector of benefits and revenues, and given the concentration of too much data required to be shared by too many people who would fully understand neither the full implications of what they held, nor how to protect it safely.'
He went on: 'The downside of connected government is that sharing data increases the risk of securing data. However, if you create a tight security model then you will in effect deny the benefits of holding the records together.
'Poynter makes sensible suggestions, but doesn't address the issue of data being secured by the IT systems themselves - i.e. who can access the data in the first place.'
The CIOT was more guarded. A spokesman briefly commented that the organisation welcomed the fact that Parliament had been updated on the matter, and the CIOT 'looked forward to the full report, on which we will give considered comment'.
ICAEW Tax Faculty chairman Paul Aplin remarked that is 'difficult to know what to say… on the basis of what [little] was said [in the interim paper]'. But he added he welcomed 'the fact that… HMRC has already undertaken the first steps of what [Kevin Poynter] advised, and that the department is taking the matter extremely seriously'.
HMRC directed all queries to the Chancellor's statement on the report.
