Well, this just makes me happy happy joy joy.

Over 610 civil servants at HMRC have been disciplined or dismissed for inappropriately accessing tax records since the department was formed by the merger of Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue three years ago.

Refreshingly, none have been caught reading HMRC personnel files, though more than 600 have been caught snooping on UK citizens’ tax records.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s not too much less than one per working day. And those are the ones that were caught… How many more got away with a sneaky peek?

And there’s been more than a few of these little transgressions in the last few months. You know, since the little incident where half the country’s personal details were misplaced by Her Majesty’s Revenue And Customs.

So that lesson sank in well, didn’t it? Boy, haven’t the civil service shown that they can be trusted to learn from their mistakes and keep our details secure? Hasn’t the government shown effectively that they should be allowed to put all out details together in a nice, shiny, single, accessible database for the ID card?

Or as I’ve always said: they done fucked up, and they’ll continue to fuck up because, organisationally, they have nothing to lose.

Plus ça change…