Chapter 4

[Ian G Batten]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Roland Perry wrote:

> In message <20030314115045.GP1422@elara.ftel.co.uk>, Ian G Batten 
> <I.G.Batten@ftel.co.uk> writes
> >But that was six months ago, so perhaps there has been a radical culture
> >change over the winter.
> 
> I'm not sure what your point is. A minority of people will always 
> seriously break the law (until perhaps caught). That's not the same as 
> making sure you have procedures to control casual abuses.
> 
> We've heard recently about Inland Revenue staff apparently being accused 
> of surfing for celebrity tax returns in the lunch hour. If they had to 

So they clearly _didn't_ have procedures to control casual abuses.  And
if I recall the story correctly, no disciplinary action was taken
because no one had told them it was a problem and it never occured to
them that it wasn't what they should be doing.

> enter the reference number of the person whose tax they were 
> investigating, every time they did a lookup, and a summary report of all 
> the investigations they were doing was sent to their boss once a week, 
> it might become much clearer that they were regularly accessing data 
> that wasn't necessary.

Not unless the boss got charged as well.  Otherwise what motive does
s/he have to bother looking at those reports?  At the moment the process
is perfect for the employees: they can do whatever they want, secure in
the knowledge that they won't be disciplined, and their boss can ignore
it because there's no incentive not to.  There is no accountability.
The process you propose is, with respect, worthless, because the reports
would be routed to /dev/null.  There has to be either a culture of
honesty in which misbehaviour would be reported by peers, or there has
to be a culture of brutal suppression of bad behaviour.

ian