fraud: a good and bad day

Yesterday I had a strange day.
Firstly, I had a call from my credit card operator to query some transactions in the previous 24 hrs. It turned out that my card had been the victim of fraudulent behaviour, although it maybe that they managed to stop the transactions early enough.
In the afternoon, I was chairing the Council's audit committee. We touched on the issue of cracking down on fraud against the city council. In the last two days the work of the Audit Committee has received some positive press coverage, despite getting some of their facts slightly wrong.
So after a long day of work and meetings, the last thing I expected was for the government to go and lose 25m peoples personal details!
The whole sorry saga does lead to some interesting questions. A particular area of work that local councils' audit teams do is something called the national fraud initiative. For that to work, details from national databases needs to be linked to other national databases, and local data to match whether there are people possibly taking advantage of different parts of the welfare and support system. For that to happen you need to be able to transmit and share personal data between local councils and government departments. I'll certainly be asking the question of our auditors to make sure we aren't sending CDs in the internal mail.