Looks like the uk government has found an entirely novel angle on the concept of "transparency"!

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"!

No offence to HMRC staff but I'm not sure if I really trust the Civil Service to decide what "generates clear public benefits" and if there are "robust safeguards in place"!

Given what happened with the NHS data, neither do I.

I'd rather an all or nothing approach to these kind of information sharing arrangements.

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.

I regularly buy data from government departments and it is extremely difficult. They are not commercially minded and regularly undercharge. You have to chase them for weeks to get anything done and the billing arrangements are complicated. In my experience UK government is terrible at selling anything.

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.

Not true - there is one team in Government that could do this: the gov.uk team. http://gov.uk is hands down the best government site I've ever seen. I'd trust those guys to be able to deliver it.

I takes a lot more than a team of dedicated people to bring something in government into completion. First - there has to be a political consensus within the department to make things happen, then a business case needs to be written and approved. A budget needs to be assigned (where to get the money is another problem), and it needs to be decided that it will be built in-house. Only then, you can actually start building things - the process above takes anywhere from 6 months to a year, sometimes more.

I never said that was all it took (you seem to be replying to a straw man), but it is a necessary element.

This story broke last night on the Guardian website:

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.

Conservative public sector policy is thoughtless Thatcherism: "Sell all the things!" (Forgive the meme)

Well, they're already selling medical records to private firms in England. Since they got away with that, they probably just want to sell as much other data as possible.

EDIT: England, not England and Wales.

No they aren't.

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. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10656893/Hospit...

And the best part? It only cost £2,200.

A one time occurance; since which the law has been chNged to make that not possible and for which people have apologised.

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.

The actual report is here. http://www.sias.org.uk/data/papers/SIASDec2013Paper/Download... It's reasonably obvious that inferences can be made from this that will affect private sector insurance premiums, but highly unlikely that anything they've done with the data could be linked to specific individuals, even though the original anonymisation was unlikely to have been sufficient

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...

> highly unlikely that anything they've done with the data could be linked to specific individuals, even though the original anonymisation was unlikely to have been sufficient

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?

We have no more but also no less reason to trust individuals who are not NHS employees from breaching data protection law than individuals who are NHS employees, and have access to much more sensitive data.

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.

As it stands, we have the NHS having access to our personal data. What the Government wants to do is expand the number of organisations that have access to that data to include private companies that we have no oversight over. At least if the NHS has shit policy, we can complain and have our complaints heard. If a private company that has nothing to do with you has shit policy? Tough luck.

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.

Yet the NHS themselves confirmed that everything was true.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/nhs/10659147/Patient-recor...

The original Telegraph article headline was "Hospital records of all NHS patients sold to insurers" (aside from the flatly false headline, the actual content of the article is pretty accurate). The IFoA that actually bought the data and did the research pointed out that they were not an insurer, nor providing any recommendations to insurers beyond the now-publicly-available macro data I linked to. In other words, no private firms - in the insurance industry or otherwise - legally have access to any medical records as a result of this sale, other than the macro research document I linked to, which you might want to read for yourself if you're concerned about what's getting into the public domain.

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

You are right. Upon inspection the incident was far less threatening than reported. I was wrong.

As an example of potential abuses by public departments selling data I think it still stands though.

Yes. Yes they are.

"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.

Here we go again.

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.

It would be nice if UK.gov could make the public financial data of firms available in an open way.

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.

I don't think there's anything special about what DueDil are doing.

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

Thank's for the links. It was the annual returns that I was talking about. I was concerned that they might have sold the documents to Duedil cheap in a bulk deal that the public didn't have access to.

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.

The source of all the data will be Companies House. You can get (presumably unlimited) access to all annual returns for £17.5k pa [1]

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

Wouldn't it be better to allow unfettered access to tax data for everyone, on everyone?

As someone who was under investigation a few years ago by the HMRC who thought I was doing something naughty, which I wasn't, absolutely no flipping way.

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).

How do you mean? To all intents and purposes Jimmy Carr was "guilty" of participating in a tax avoidance scheme, and admitted wrongdoing.

In what way is avoiding tax through a legal vehicle guilty of a crime?

Do you volunteer extra tax when you don't have to?

Tax avoidance/tax efficiency is not tax evasion.

I did not say Jimmy Carr admitted criminal wrongdoing.

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.

Previous comment used the term legally guilty.

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.

I'm pretty sure that in the UK, participants in tax avoidance schemes are required to log details of them with HMRC under the DOTAS (Disclosure of Tax Avoidance Schemes) rules. There are a variety of tests which determine whether or not a particular arrangement is disclosable.

You do now. You didn't have to then.

My father in law is a senior partner in a national accountancy firm. He refers to it is as the Jimmy Carr disclosure.

Avoiding tax is not illegal. Most business do this even by paying dividends versus salary for example.

Evading tax is.

He was avoiding tax.

It's more complicated than that. He was using a so-called "Registered Tax-Avoidance Scheme" (TAS for short). TAS's are basically entire schemes built around a loophole in the tax law.

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.

What is your point about Jimmy Carr? He stopped using an avoidance scheme once it was reported in the media-noting to do with the HMRC.

In Norway, tax returns are public. It's a good system.

I feel it is a violation of my privacy. It is a disgusting system.

I like it. It means people know how much others are earning. Wealth should be transparent.

>> "I like it. It means people know how much others are earning."

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.

That's the whole point. It means people are more acutely aware of the inequality of income in society.

People are trained to find itnrue so that high earners don't feel uncomfortable being at the top of inequality.

Swedish tax records are public, but difficult to access, I think its a great system, if youre really curious you can go or call tax office and ask for anybodies tax numbers thus know how much they earn.

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.

Off topic: Did anyone else notice that the bbc.co.uk website is asking for a certificate for identification?

Yep. I clicked cancel and decided not to worry about it for now. I'm interested to know what it's about though.

Yes - I keep getting this. It's rather peculiar.

If you think this stuff is worth signing an online petition over: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/dont-sell-our-tax-...