For the third time in three months and at the beginning of the identity theft’s busiest season, lax security procedures in Great Britain have led to the mishandling and loss of personal information by government officials.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer confirmed that files containing the personal data on 25 million people went missing last month. Two compact disks were being carried in the government's internal mail without any form of protection and have gone missing. The data relates to families receiving child benefits and contains their names, addresses, national insurance numbers, dates of birth, and bank account details.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been taking a great deal of heat for the mishap and announced an investigation today. The records reportedly disappeared after a junior official failed to post them according to regulations and sent them to auditors. They never arrived.

Brown said there is no evidence that the information has fallen into criminal hands. However, banks have warned customers to look for signs of fraud in their accounts.

Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum, said the announcement is breathtaking because of the scale of the loss, but not because it is a unique event. It is the third major data leakage from HM Revenue and Customs in just three months.

Titterington said it is unlikely that the data has fallen into the hands of identity thieves, but it does undermine the entire national identity ecosystem of the country. “The U.K. government, and the nation, is reduced to hoping that these two CDs are languishing in a trash can somewhere,” he said.

He cited a recent leakage of information from the U.K. Visa applications system and an earlier leak from the Department of Work and Pensions—two of the key components of the proposed National Identity database.

“So long as it is physically possible for junior officials to download complete databases, there can be no confidence in the security of information contained in them,” Titterington said. “The potential for identity theft increases exponentially as the amount of information about each individual increases.”