There is a need to balance the public interest in gathering information and the right to individual privacy. Thus I would like to ask whether the Bill will facilitate more data gathering but make compromises on information safeguards.
Specifically, the Bill has gotten rid of a safeguard which is present in the existing S 7(6) of the Act. Under the existing S 7, information that may have been provided under confidential circumstances to the Census Dept, CPF Board, Customs, Comptroller of GST and Comptroller of Income Tax had 2 layers of checks. The first check was that the Minister in charge of the department which gathered the data has the power to put restrictions on what the statisticians can disclose after obtaining the information. There was an additional check under S 7(6) – that no information furnished by them to the Chief Statistician or director of any research unit can be disclosed without the written permission of the department itself.
Sir, the departments referred to in the current S 7(6) indeed collect sensitive tax information, personal data and a person’s employment details. They may also have gathered the data under obligations of secrecy. The importance of this additional safeguard on privacy by the agency itself was in fact highlighted in Parliament in 1990 and again in 2004 when amendments to the Statistics Act were debated. It was stressed by 2 different Ministers that due to the sensitivity of these data, the approval of the agency itself – whether the CPF Board, Comptroller of GST or Comptroller of Income Tax, etc, should be obtained before statisticians release it. This is over and on top of the Minister’s right to restrict the disclosure of the information.
What this amendment bill appears to do is to repeal the Third Schedule altogether, which means that these 5 sensitive departments are now grouped together with the entire government machinery as “public agencies”. Under the new S6, the Ministers in charge can exempt their agencies from disclosing certain information to the statisticians. However, the safeguard of requiring the 5 agencies to specifically give written approval before release of their data has been removed. Instead, in the new S 7(3), it is the Chief Statistician or the director of the research unit who can impose conditions on the use of the information supplied.
Is this change a compromise on the safeguards of the confidential data gathered? With due respect, the Chief Statistician or the director of the research unit may have no specialist knowledge of the subject matter nor the public expectations at the time the data was gathered. I would like the Minister to clarify why it was necessary to remove this additional check by the 5 departments, which clearly gather sensitive information.
(Note: this speech was delivered in Parliament on 11 Jan 2010.)
