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01 May 2008

Look at these lovely tax details!

In cock-up Britain the tax authorities needlessly copy personal data to CDs then lose them. Clinton’s staffers stole the ‘W’s from White House keyboards when the apparently perfectly intelligent George Bush 2 took over at US&A. In Machiavellian Italy an outgoing administration deliberately posts everyone’s tax details, including salary, on the web (in this extraordinary story from the Beeb), apparently to poke Berlusconi in the eye.

Openness about tax is the norm in Scandinavia, but a complete shocker for Italians. Tax-dodging is somewhere between rife and socially acceptable in Italy. The outgoing administration must have been exasperated beyond reason at the thought of a crooked tax dodger getting back into power.

We knew the vast mounds of personal data held often unnecessarily by government were already at risk from nitwits and criminal insiders. We’d better add “piqued outgoing administrations” to the list of risks.

Wibbi government reduced its risk and liability by minimising its holdings of non-essential personal data, anonymising wherever possible, and encrypting the small proportion it is essential to keep? Not that it would have helped Italy here.

Wibbi the technical immortality attributed to Silvio Berlusconi were quickly proved to be a phantasm? Or is that unkind...he is entertaining, in a John Prescottey sort of way.

Wibbi we could take the best of Italy and and the best of Scandinavia and be enlightened and responsible with decent weather, good food and sublime artistic sensibility and sense of humour to boot? Well, we can but ask…

• Posted by William Heath on 01/05/08 at 10:28am
• Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust · Data nitwittery
• Comments (1)  Permalink

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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