More than 600 tax workers have been caught snooping...
More than 600 tax workers have been caught snooping on personal files, Government admits <snip> Treasury minister Jane Kennedy stressed that the department tightly controlled access to citizens' records. She told MPs: "HMRC has a strict policy forbidding staff to access customer records unless they have a legitimate business need. In many cases the disciplinary penalty for breach is dismissal." She said the figures represented less than one per cent of HMRC staff. But the admission that hundreds have broken the rules is likely to raise fresh concerns about security of information held by the taxman. <snip> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=563201&in_page_id=1770 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Corrupt scum. :x Doubtless they've been illegally selling people's addresses and other data to Private Investigators, Journalists and debt collection agencies.

It's worse in Italy... There has been outrage in Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian's declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet. The tax authority's website was inundated by people curious to know how much their neighbours, celebrities or sports stars were making. The Italian treasury suspended the website after a formal complaint from the country's privacy watchdog. The information was put on the site with no warning for nearly 24 hours. Sour grapes? The release of the information was one of the last acts of the outgoing centre-left government and has shocked many tax-shy Italians, says the BBC's Mark Duff in Milan. But it was also hugely popular, and within hours the site was overwhelmed and impossible to access. The finance ministry described the move as a bid to improve transparency. Deputy Economic Minister Vincenzo Visco said he could not understand what all the fuss was about. snip http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7376608.stm