FCA reveals myriad of data protection blunders

Revealed in FOI request

Tom Ellis
clock • 1 min read

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has lost confidential enforcement documents on multiple occasions and accidentally sent 'highly sensitive' regulatory reports to the wrong firm, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed.

As part of a series of data protection breaches, the regulator had sent confidential enforcement documents to the wrong company in September 2014. The FCA said the documents had been collected by the wrong courier and were returned once the mistake was discovered. The regulator had also lost files relating to action being taken against a firm on its own premises in March 2015, followed by an external contractor losing other "enforcement-related papers" outside its offices five months later. Neither set of documents has ever been recovered. The series of blunders was revealed by the...

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