HMRC 'plans to share tax data with private firms'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Between that and the NHS data and their reaction to Snowden, the meaning of transparency in the uk is clearly "we'll release all your private individual data while keeping secret everything that we do"!
If information is to be shared, it should be made freely available to all, not just to corporations that are able to shell out large sums for it.
An API for tax data would have lots of possible applications, as a way of checking income for example. But it is doubtful that the government would ever have the skills to pull it off. They should either sell the data through a competent third party or make it open.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/18/hmrc-to-sell...
Although it's not clear that it has come from an official HMRC statement (I couldn't find anything on its website), the timing of this -- the Friday evening / Saturday morning of the Easter bank holiday weekend -- feels like someone finding a good time to bury controversial news.
EDIT: England, not England and Wales.
There's a point where hyperbole becomes sensationalising, and where sensationalising becomes deceptive.
The medical records of every NHS hospital
patient in the country have been sold for
insurance purposes, The Telegraph can reveal.
[...]
a report by a major society of actuaries
discloses that it was able to obtain 13
years of hospital data [...] covering all
hospital in-patient stays between 1997 and
2010 to track the medical histories of
patients, identified by date of birth and
postcode.
And the best part? It only cost £2,200.
While patient data was released (and possibly poorly anonymised) that was not "patient records" which have a defined meaning.
So the very worst example of "selling off patient records" wasn't patient records, only happened once, has been acknowledged as a failure, and can't happen again because the law has been changed since.
In the interests of balance, it's worth pointing out the non-profit organization linked to the insurance sector in question specifically denies some of the claims made in the Telegraph article: http://www.actuaries.org.uk/news/press-releases/articles/tel...
So even if we take a professional body which represents the interests of the insurance industry at their word, we still have to trust that private companies with little or no public oversight will somehow decide to do the right thing?
It's blatantly obvious that a postcode and age is enough to match a record to an individual. Why are we expected to trust private industry not to mess with our privacy?
On a pedantic note, the data was split by postcode district and age, with the average postcode district being 20,000 people. I still agree that's not data you'd want on a private insurers' database because they could de-anonymise outliers like the only 97 year old man, and others with partial knowledge of their hospital visit history, but it would be a lot of work making it usable for granting or denying insurance to particular individuals. Especially when it's probably easier to gain illicit access to the non-anonymised records than gain and make sense of illicit access to the anonymised records.
Additionally, there's many things that an organisation can do with data that are not in breach of data protection law,, but which I do not want them doing anyway, especially without me explicitly opting in to giving them that data. Data protection law mostly just says that they can't share it with other companies without your permission, they must let you know what it is if you ask, and you have the right to have it corrected if it's wrong. And even then, there's plenty enough companies in the UK that don't even meet those rules all the time!
This is not about individuals. This is about organisations.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/nhs/10659147/Patient-recor...
The link you've just posted has the NHS-linked body in question admitting "greater scrutiny should have been applied" in this instance, but actually reasserts all the points made by IFoA: they're not an insurer, it's a general study on frequencies of illnesses amongst certain demographics and there's no personally-identifiable data accessible to insurers as a result of this. The HSCIC making a hand-wavy non-apology != the NHS confirming that this is an example of a private firm they sold your medical records to
As an example of potential abuses by public departments selling data I think it still stands though.
"However, a report by a major society of actuaries discloses that it was able to obtain 13 years of hospital data – covering 47 million patients – in order to help insurance companies “refine” their premiums. The report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries details how it was able to use NHS data covering all hospital in-patient stays between 1997 and 2010 to track the medical histories of patients, identified by date of birth and postcode.
The 274-page report describes the NHS Hospital Episode Statistics as a “valuable data source in developing pricing assumptions for 'critical illness’ cover.”
There is a point where your denial is farcical and where farcical is fallacious.
Probably some greedy fuck of a civil servant (probably one of Cameron's ex-Eton buddies or friendly conservative slime like Guake) working out how to sell out our infrastructure to industry and make a larger bonus this year whilst doing fuck all.
Hopefully the last non-political unit (the ICO) will stamp on this quickly.
You can buy a firms financials from the government for £1 a company, or buy a full dataset for several thousand pounds. For little people wanting to do statistical analysis, that is unaffordable.
An awesome startup here, duedil, somehow got the rights to the data, and makes it available for viewing through a lovely website. But giving some company monopoly on public data is really messed up. Good on duedil, but the government is really failing by putting them in that position.
Basic company information is public domain, and available to download in bulk [1] or via URI [2]
Companies House also offer a free app for iOS and Android [3] providing some additional info, e.g. details of directors and filing histories. If you delve into it, that is all served by a JSON API.
Accounts data has recently been opened up for free [4], providing info on about 60% of companies (all those that file accounts electronically, from what I gather) but the data is in (i)XBRL format, and I don't know how amenable it is to statistical analysis.
Documents are my biggest pain at the moment. I believe annual returns, etc. should be public domain, and I think it is wrong that Companies House have the authority to charge for access to them.
[1] http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html
[2] http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/about/miscellaneous/URI.sht...
[3] http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/mobile-app/
[4] http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_accountsdata.html
However, looking into how Duedil got its dataset, it appears they buy the digitised data from Experian and friends, who get it from who knows where.
I can't imagine the government make enormous sums of money through the sale of such data, and I think there is a significant public interest in this kind of company data being freely available.
[1] http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/toolsToHelp/ourPrices.shtml
Tax is one of the few areas in which you are morally and legally guilty until proven innocent (asset freezes and Jimmy Carr for example).
Do you volunteer extra tax when you don't have to?
Tax avoidance/tax efficiency is not tax evasion.
I am well aware of the distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion, but in many jurisdictions (including the UK) there is legislation that also renders tax avoidance schemes illegal if the arrangements are sufficiently artificial or abusive.
Since the Carr affair, HMRC have implemented the General Anti-Abuse Rule (GAAR). Although it has not, to my knowledge, been tested at a tax tribunal, I am fairly confident the arrangement Carr entered into would be deemed abusive under this new legislation.
You then referenced Jimmy Carr as an example and used the words guilty inferring legal and moral guilt.
He was guilty of neither but he had a public persona to protect and admit wrongdoing where none existed.
If subsequent legislation attempts to limit TAS with the "fair admittance" rule of checking the box it has no retrospective bearing on the conduct of Jimmy Carr.
My father in law is a senior partner in a national accountancy firm. He refers to it is as the Jimmy Carr disclosure.
Evading tax is.
He was avoiding tax.
Each time the government announces a new Budget, they include a raft of measures to try and plug these holes, but there are companies that specialise in finding these loopholes and helping their clients exploit them (for a fairly sizeable fee). They pay some top lawyers to provide a quote that "yes, damnit, the loophole exists", and then they go on their merry dance to acquire clients to make use of those loopholes.
As my accountant explained it to me at the time (before I decided to stay the hell away from those things), the difference between regular tax avoidance and registered tax avoidance schemes is that in the first case, you and your accountant think you're paying a fair amount (and HMRC may disagree), whilst in the second case, you, your accountant, and HMRC all know you're playing dirty.
Example: one of the more popular TAS's was to set up an employee benefits trust, with you (the business owner) as the beneficiary. Payments to the trust could be seen as staffing costs, thereby attracting no Corporation Tax on profit. The trust would then loan you the money at zero interest and with no expectation of it ever being repaid, thereby avoiding income tax. Bingo - zero tax! But obviously exploiting a hole in the rules.
This has been progressively clamped down on - first by requiring people using TAS's to declare that they are using them (which allows HMRC to target them more effectively), and in the latest Budget, by requiring users of TAS's to pay the tax first as if they weren't using the TAS and then argue with HMRC over whether the TAS is valid.
I think overall the TAS thing is on the way out... but it's really worth drawing the line between regular tax avoidance (i.e. reducing your tax using very legit mechanisms like capital allowances, R&D tax credits, dividends/salary splits, etc) vs registered tax avoidance schemes, which are just dirty business.
As far as I know, Jimmy Carr was using a registered tax avoidance scheme.
That might seem fine if you are earning a decent salary but if you are working a shitty job to make ends meet it can be embarrassing. It's the main reason people find it rude to discuss each others salaries.
Its part of a transparent and open society. But there is no webservice somewhere where people can look on a map or search easily and so on.
If you take it to next level you can buy a book containing all names addreses and taxable income and capital for an area.
good system because its public like the records and not private.