A government department posted a letter to an applicant’s obsolete address
The Complaint
The complainant was a user of two public services offered by a government department (“the Department”), and he had provided his address to the Department when he applied for both services. The complainant was dissatisfied that after he had submitted an address update to the Department through the GovHK platform (“GovHK”), the Department still posted a letter to the complainant’s obsolete address. The complainant hence lodged a complaint with the PCPD against the Department.
Outcome
According to the Department, the two services used by the complainant were managed by different teams within the Department. The two teams stored applicants’ information for the two services in two separate systems and updated their respective information independently, with different address update procedures. The Department explained that the address update made by the complainant via GovHK was only applicable to one of the two services. Since the complainant did not update his address with the team responsible for the other service, that team thus referred to the address record in its system and sent a letter to the complainant’s obsolete address.
Upon intervention of the PCPD, the Department has prepared a new form for updating the relevant address for the other service, and revised the existing personal data update form and the relevant email and letter templates, so as to explicitly inform service users that the address update is only applicable to the individual relevant service, and remind them to notify the relevant team(s) if they need to change the address record for other services within the Department.
Lesson learnt
Organisations may assign different teams to manage different projects or services according to their operational needs. While division of work within an organisation is a common phenomenon, service users may not appreciate that different teams would maintain their independent address records. If an organisation put in place different procedures for updating personal data for different projects or services, the organisation should convey clear messages to service users about the different procedures under different services, in order to ensure that they are fully aware of how to update their personal data for different services. This can help avoid misunderstanding and maintain the accuracy of personal data.
(Uploaded in February 2025)