HM Revenue & Customs has a long litany of disasters to confess, ranging from lost laptops to the tax credit 'nightmare':

October 2007

A laptop containing data on up to 2,000 people with investment ISAs is stolen. In Parliamentary answers Ministers reveal that 41 laptops were stolen from HMRC in the past 12 months

September 2007

A CD containing names, national insurance numbers, dates of birth and pension data of about 15,000 Standard Life customers goes missing. The data was lost en route from the Revenue office in Newcastle to the company's headquarters in Edinburgh

August 2007

Businesses registering for VAT for the first time face unprecedented delays because of the Government’s attempts to crack down on carousel frauds and cut costs. In extreme cases, businesses have had to wait more than six months for their VAT registration

May 2007

HMRC forced to extend the self-assessment filing deadline to 28 May and mitigate penalties for late filing, after tax agents complain that the online serivce is so slow that the only way to file a return is at 4am or weekends

May 2007

Parliamentary Accounts Committee reports again on the tax credit system. Committee says £5.8 billion was overpaid to claimants in the first three years of the current tax credits scheme, due to administrative errors by HMRC

February 2007

HMRC comes under fire for offering tax inspectors bonuses of up to £2,000 to encourage them to collect 25 per cent more tax during 2007

December 2006

A National Audit Office report indicates that 5.7 million taxpayers may not be paying the right amount of tax because they are using the wrong tax code. HMRC estimates are that taxpayers have overpaid around £500 million via PAYE, and that £1 billion of tax may have been underpaid

January 2006

HMRC apologises to 10,000 firms after fining them at least £400 each by mistake because of a basic flaw in the design of automatic systems that issue penalty notices

September 2005

The Public Accounts Committee denounces the tax credit system as a "nightmare". MPs say tax credits have been routinely overpaid to 1.8 million claimants and claims the system may be fatally undermined by its complexity. Follows reports from the Ombudsman and complaints from Citizens Advice.

May 2002

Ten months after its launch, the Inland Revenue's self-assessment online tax returns service suffers a major security breach when taxpayers filing their tax return online were able to view each others' personal information.