
HMRC: it’s using artificial intelligence to gather information about you. But is it gathering too much?
This does not seem right:
The taxman has been using its own data system for years to snoop on taxpayers.
HMRC holds billions of our data items, including email and bank records, as part of its system used to target taxpayers for investigations.
It has revealed that there are now 55 billion items of data relating to taxpayers in its ‘Connect’ system, which was launched to tackle the growing tax gap, according to tax investigation insurance experts PfP.
The tax gap is the difference between the tax that should be paid and the amount HMRC actually collects and last year the figure stood at £32billion.
The article goes on to say that Connect has been in use since 2010 and its database has now grown to 6,100 gigabytes of taxpayer data.
The implication is that none of the information about any of us has been discarded – and it seems to me that this is in breach of the Data Protection Act.
The fifth data protection principle states that information should not be kept longer than is required for the purpose for which it was collected.
No specific time limit is given but HM Revenue & Customs’ own guidelines suggest that six years is the reasonable limit.
That means, by its own measure, HMRC may have retained seven years’ worth of information illegally.
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