DO YOU WANT THE GOOD NEWS OR THE BAD NEWS?

U.K. Inland Revenue Says Tax Records `Accidentally' Deleted

By Robert Hutton
Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.K. Inland Revenue, the agency that
collects income tax, says it has ``accidentally'' deleted the
records of an unknown number of people and so can't say whether the
taxpayers concerned owe it money or are due refunds.
The taxpayers affected are people who left jobs three years
ago and didn't start work again or begin taking a pension, the
Inland Revenue said in a statement. That would include women who
stopped working after having babies, people sent to prison,
students who had left summer jobs to return to university, and
people who had died.
The agency, which has 30 million people on its database, said
it has been unable to recover the records and doesn't know how many
sets were deleted from its computer system. Hundreds of thousands
of people may be affected, said Richard Bacon, a lawmaker from the
opposition Conservative Party, who is calling for an investigation.
``How an organization doing something as important as the
Inland Revenue can be so sloppy as accidentally to delete
potentially large quantities of data is difficult to understand,''
said Bacon. ``Some taxpayers will not have received repayments to
which they are entitled and others may owe money which has not been
collected.''


I left my job in the UK three years ago and didn't start working there again.

Not sure if this is good news or bad news.

Could be an interesting call to the accountant!

By the way if you're wondering why this looks rather odd it's because my Internet Explorer isn't working so I'm using Netscape which doesn't seem to be very blogger friendly

UPDATE - I.E. is back! Hurrah