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My mate was hired by the Home Office. He's a statistician. His first project was to assess how effective the tagging program was.
He spent the first two weeks reading the reports, then trying (in vain) to find the actual data that the reports promised was there.
No actual data. Lots of fancy reports with conclusions drawn from data sets that just didn't exist.
So he rather nervously explained to his boss that not only could they not assess how effective it was, but couldn't even tell how many people were actually tagged, let alone who, and that the billing numbers had nothing to back them up.
A week later he got moved to a different project, about six months later it blew up in the press.
"Shouldn't the MoJ know this kind of stuff already?!?"
They did. That's why it was trivial to show the numbers were wrong. Further inspection revealed the numbers had *nothing* to back them up. Not people tagged, not physical tags issued, nothing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
