The tax workers’ union president has hit back at plans to limit access to taxpayers’ data, saying that a recently announced plan merely is an attempt to "cover up the incompetence" of the Government.
Secretary of State for Fiscal Affairs Paulo Núncio (pictured) is accused of trying to "change the subject" of the VIP Taxpayers List, according to Paulo Ralha.
The Tax and Customs Authority now plans "to install a computerised system for tax workers who will have to justify accessing taxpayer data and to limit access to sensitive tax data by external companies."
Paulo Ralha said that the measures announced are designed simply to "cover up the incompetence" of the Secretary of State for Fiscal Affairs.
"These are measures designed to blur the issue of the Secretary of State's judgement in this matter. What has happened here is a crime, the creation of the VIP Taxpayers List, and what the Secretary of State is trying to do and has done from the beginning is to confuse the issue, first by saying that there was "no VIP Taxpayers List," and now by inventing some unjustifiable measures that will only complicate the lives of workers and taxpayers," said Ralha.
According to the union boss, workers already are subject to database control mechanisms and the new measures are not justified.
After the VIP Taxpayers List controversy hit the headlines, the National Data Protection Commission and the Finance General Inspection both issued highly critical reports of the Tax Authority’s lack of protocols regarding the protection of taxpayer information.
As a result, the Secretary of State Paulo Núncio asked the Tax Authority to submit a plan of action, which was delivered last Friday.
The plan, fronted by Helena Borges, contains dozens of measures, among them next month’s planned implementation of a new field for tax workers to fill in to record why they are accessing the records they want to work on.
When the VIP Taxpayers List was proven to exist, despite government denials, it was shown that tax department staff triggered an alert if certain VIP’s tax records were accessed.
This led management to pull the worker aside to explain why he has been looking at the tax data of top politicians and other notables.
If, as Paulo Ralha suggests, a 'reason for access' field already pops up on tax workers' screens, the Big New Plan for data security will indeed contain the whiff of smokescreen.
