WRITTEN ON December 14th, 2005 BY Richard Allan AND STORED IN Transformational Government

This story from the Guardian should be at the top of the agenda for everyone involved in eGovernment with these chilling paragraphs:

The identities of up to 10,000 civil servants have been stolen by criminals to make thousands of fraudulent claims for family tax credit in one of the biggest benefit scams seen in Britain….

…Staff at Revenue and Customs are also claiming that fraudsters are using the department’s inquiry line to ring up and change genuine claimants’ address and bank account details to get their benefits diverted. The department this month closed down its internet e-portal – used by 500,000 people a year – because of the level of fraud.

My comment on this:

There is a lot of optimism about the Transforming Government agenda at the moment. It seems so obvious that putting in place modern electronic systems for government functions can deliver productivity gains which will benefit the public sector as a whole. A strong line of argument is also put that today’s citizens, especially younger ones, expect this sort of service delivery so it is imperative that government can offer it.

But these are massive systems involving thousands of staff with access to them and a consequent high level of security risk. It only takes a few problems for confidence to be damaged irreparably in an online system. Commercial operators like eBay or Amazon invest massively to protect their brands but if, in spite of this, there were breaches and loss of trust then this would not be disastrous for their consumers who could at least transfer their loyalties to another business offering similar services.

With government services like tax and benefits there is only one place you can go. This places an even higher premium on trust in that system. The death knell for the eVoting pilots in the UK was sounded by the damage done to electoral trust as cases of postal vote fraud came to light. We could not afford to open up more channels for remote unsupervised voting without resolving some of the trust issues involved in postal votes.

The news that both the Tax Credits system and Civil Service payroll systems have been compromised on a serious scale should serve as a warning for other Government services. If decisions are being taken to transform government that cannot realistically be reversed then the public will expect security guarantees that retain their confidence in the new systems. Trust is all important and is far more than just a technical issue. And if it cannot be assured beyond reasonable doubt then we should hold back on transformations until it can.