The controversial outsourcing company Capita is facing questions over its data security procedures after it admitted sending a recording of a disabled woman being assessed for a disability benefit to another claimant.
This is not the first time, nor I suspect will it be the last time that Capita have been accused of sending information about one claimant to another. And in some cases, merging information from several claimants into a single claim. I have heard from several people who have received personal independence payment (PIP) rejections from Capita based upon a dialogue that just doesn’t fit their claim. It’s almost as if the interviewer had dropped their papers after a series of interviews and then reshuffled them into a random order!
I spoke to one disabled woman who, having had her first PIP claim rejected, tried again some 12 months later as her medical condition had worsened considerably. After the telephone interview she waited for the result, only to discover that she’d been rejected yet again because … and here is where the problem arose. The rejection letter contained information that clearly belonged to another claimant mixed in with some of her own responses.
Another claimant I spoke to had a similar experience when his rejection feed-back letter containing information that just didn’t relate to his claim. He is going to lodge an appeal, bringing up this anomaly as part of his claim. Regrettably, the disabled women I mentioned previously just doesn’t have the energy to fight her rejection and will probably try again sometime in the future if she feels stronger.
Despite Capita being awarded another new government assessment contracts worth £565 million last September its suitability for that work, which will see it carry out hundreds of thousands of assessments a year for a range of disability benefits across the Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland, has again been called into question.
Only last year, the information commissioner reported how “a large number” of organisations had reported breaches of personal data by Capita, following the company being targeted in a cyber-attack, while reports also emerged that it had been storing people’s information in a publicly-available online location.
You can read the full story in Disability News Service.
Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software
A couple of Capita employees are folding assessment response letters into paper aeroplanes and launching them at a row of slots in a far wall. Each slot is labelled claimant A, claimant B, etc., and each paper plane is labelled A, B, C etc. One of them is saying to the other: ”See – some of them get into the right slots!”
Crippen Cartoons 