Revenue no closer to solving deleted tax records gaffe

The Inland Revenue is no closer to discovering how many tax records were accidentally deleted as part of a routine housekeeping process last year, and has admitted that it is not a high priority.

The software error led to taxpayer records on the PAYE database being deleted before the final end-of-year review had determined whether tax was overpaid or underpaid on them.

The deletion process was only supposed to be applied to non-live files where the taxpayer had been out of employment for three years.

The Inland Revenue has spent a year investigating the errors without being able to confirm how many records could be affected. The Revenue insists only a small number of records have been affected, but equally admits it could still be in the hundreds of thousands.

Lord McIntosh of Haringey, parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, told the House of Lords on 10 November that it was a "small minority" of records that had been accidentally deleted and that the results of a survey to determine who they were and how many there are would be announced "within three weeks".

"There will inevitably be failings in an IT environment with 140 major business applications and 87,000 users, not to mention the number of taxpayers. One need only look at the number of failings identified to see that they are a very small minority and that fundamentally the integrity of the IT systems is sound," he told the House of Lords.

But when silicon.com contacted the Inland Revenue a spokesman admitted it still does not know how many records were accidentally deleted. He said the Inland Revenue would not have a figure before Christmas and that it is not a high priority, as the records affected are not live.