Left Holding the Baby (but not the CDs)

[major_clanger]

More from The Guardian on the Great Missing CDs Fiasco:

"A spokesperson for HMRC said: "This individual should not have been involved. It was none of their business. They should have forwarded it on to someone else - another group of civil servants at a more senior level ... The individual in question had nothing to do with that team and it was completely outside their job remit."

Ooh, do any other legal types out there detect the phrase "a frolic of his own" winging its way inexorably towards this sorry mess? It would be very, very convenient for HMRC to be able to deny vicarious liability for this person's mistake, wouldn't it?

Comments

[timill]

Presumably the job that was run was a standard extract job that's used all the time to pull data off the mainframe for internal HMRC purposes. That, I suspect, was within this person's usual remit; what was outside that remit is, I suspect, "talking to other Government Departments", not "extracting data".