A Freedom of Information request to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has revealed that 68 per cent of the fines it has levied since January 2019 have not been paid.

A year ago The SMS Works, an SMS Application Programming Interface firm, reported initial findings around problems the data regulator was having collecting penalties.

That report revealed that 42 per cent of all the fines handed out remained unpaid.

The new figures show that of the 47 unpaid fines handed out between 2015 and the end of July 2019, the ICO has succeeded in collecting just one more additional fine – from Facebook for a serious breach of personal data in October 2018.

The ICO previously stated that it would deploy debt collection agencies, adding that it “works closely with the Insolvency Service in these cases, to not only seek to recover the money owed to the taxpayer but also to support action to disqualify the worst offenders from running companies in the future”.

However, the total of unpaid fines issued up to July 2019 was £6.55 million, or 39.4 per cent.

From January 2019 to the end of August 2020, the ICO handed out 21 fines to companies, amounting to £3.2 million. Of this, just £1.03 million has been collected, which equates to 32 per cent of all fines issued. Only nine out of 21 of the fines issued during the period have been paid.

Despite the new regulations that make company directors individually responsible for paying fines, many are claiming voluntary insolvency and successfully avoiding payment.

Some companies deliberately shut down their business to avoid paying a fine, only to reopen a new company, in a process known as ‘phoenixing’.

The SMS Works noted that Black Lion Marketing used this exact tactic when faced with a fine from The ICO for £171,000 in March this year. They were found not only to be phoenixing the business, but also of using “fictitious company names in an apparent attempt to conceal its true identity”.

In the run up to the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018, many predicted a spike in fines, but as it turns out there have actually been far fewer.

In 2017 to 2018, 89 fines were handed out, while between 2019 and 2020 there were only 29.

Data breaches accounted for 51 per cent of fines issues since 2015. Of all the spam offences - calls, SMS, email - nuisance calls remain the most fined, attracting 63 fines, or 28 per cent. Email spam was the least fined offence, with just 14 fines handed out.

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