When and how was HM Revenue & Customs created? What new powers was it given?

The department was founded when the Inland Revenue merged with HM Customs and Excise on April 18, 2005. HMRC admits that it is still working on its office integration, but claims that the Revenue side of the new department has not gained any of the powers of the old Customs department.

How might the merger have helped to create the current crisis?

When the department was merged it was immediately ordered to trim 25,000 of the 94,000 total staff, cutting costs year-on-year, while it was simultaneously ordered to improve services.

Q&A: how can I protect myself?

Advice for anyone who fears their personal data may be misused by fraudsters after Britain's worst ever security breach

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BACKGROUND

• Police step in as other CDs have gone astray

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• Data watchdog seeks dawn-raid powers

• New data law 'urgently needed'

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Only last month the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICA) delivered a damning verdict saying the two targets were at odds.

Michael Izza, chief executive of the ICA, said it had been warning for months that the new department was struggling to cope: “It manifests itself in things like postbags unopened for weeks.”

What are the working conditions like inside the HMRC? Is it true that staff found a roomful of unopened mail?

Anonymous e-mailers, claiming to be staff, contacted the BBC today claiming that morale was low in the department and that backlogs and lax practice were increasingly common inside the department.

An HMRC spokesman said the claims of overflowing rooms of post were nonsense, although he admitted that the cyclical nature of their mail meant a backlog sometimes developed. The ICA report suggests that there may have been a problem in keeping up to date with the required workload.

Has the Revenue been relying more heavily on temporary agency staff since the job cuts?

An HMRC spokesman said that they had not.

What is HMRC's exact procedure for transmitting personal data, and how was it broken?

There is a detailed protocol that all employees using personal data are obliged to follow. This is designed to create a traceable audit trail so that all transmitted data can be tracked. In this instance an employee did not uphold that protocol.

Such a quantity of sensitive information should never have been downloaded onto CDs to be posted.

If the National Audit Office had wanted to examine the details recorded on the discs it should have sent an official with a cryptographic key to the HMRC office. There the officer could have viewed it on a stand alone computer in a secure environment.

The information should not have left the building.

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