HMRC staff lose £2m of taxpayer-funded laptops and mobile phones

Telegraph

14-07-2025

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) employees have lost £2m worth of taxpayer-funded laptops and mobile phones in the past five years, The Telegraph can reveal.
Around 2,300 mobile phones and 507 laptops have gone missing since 2021, a Freedom of Information request found, as well as 23 USB computer memory devices.
In the past year alone, staff at HMRC have lost around 10 mobile phones and two laptops every week.
The tax office insisted it took immediate action to deactivate the missing devices and prevent any further losses.
In addition, over the same time period, 145 phones were logged as having been stolen, along with 627 laptops and two memory devices.
The average cost of replacement was estimated at around £500, taking the cost of the lost phones and laptops to almost £1.5m. The bill to replace the stolen electronic equipment was another £386,000.
HMRC officials said the figures may be too high as often equipment is found at a later date.
It comes after scammers posing as taxpayers stole £47m from the online HMRC accounts of 100,000 people.
The tax office has faced criticism for allowing staff to work from home. In 2023, The Telegraph revealed thousands of HMRC staff were not going into the office at all.
There has also been a long-term decline in the standard of service offered by HMRC to taxpayers.
A document published by The Telegraph last year showed that in 1995, the tax office answered 99pc of calls within 15 minutes. By comparison, 63pc of callers waited longer than 10 minutes before speaking to an adviser in 2024.
The latest figure revealing the cost of lost and stolen equipment at HMRC does not include the security implications associated with so much equipment disappearing.
Officials at HMRC said that all equipment is locked with a codeword, and that it can be remotely wiped clear of data after it is reported missing.
William Yarwood, at the TaxPayers' Alliance campaign group, said: 'It's a disgrace that HMRC has lost or had stolen millions of pounds worth of taxpayer-funded tech.
'If the taxman expects the public to keep track of every penny they owe, the least they can do is keep track of their own phones and laptops.
'This sort of negligence would never fly in the private sector – it's time HMRC cleaned up its act.'
Cyber security expert, Graham Cluley, said: 'Any security-savvy organisation that equips its staff with laptops and smartphones needs to put measures in place to handle how to ensure data remains secure if devices are lost or stolen.
'Furthermore, and it sounds like HMRC has done this, there should be a way to remotely wipe devices if they are mislaid to further reduce the chances that an unauthorised party can extract sensitive data from them.
'All users should be reminded of the importance of locking their computing devices when they are not in use, or set them to automatically lock if they are accidentally left unattended.
'If these sensible measures have been adopted by HMRC, chances are that sensitive data will not fall into the wrong hands – and the only cost will be the cost of replacing the lost hardware, rather than the potentially much larger cost of a data breach.'
An HMRC spokesperson said: 'We take quick action to deactivate any lost or stolen devices and investigate all security incidents, taking steps to reduce future recurrences.'