Maybe I'm Missing Something

OK, maybe it's just me, but I get the feeling that there's something missing from the information that we're being given about the missing 25 million child benefit records.

It's emerged today that one of the problems was that it was going to cost too much to provide the NAO with just the information from the database they wanted, so the whole lot was sent (and lost) instead.

Now, in my simple, Pooh Bear like brain, I'm thinking like this. Now as an ICT teacher, I've got loads of students who have to create databases (in MS Access for their and my sins). Now occasionally they will make a mistake and will need to import data from other database tables into their ones. It takes 'not a lot of time', though I will concede they are not dealing with 25m records. However, are we expect to believe that the database that the HMRC are using doesn't have this ability and is therefore inferior to MS Access (try not to laugh at this point). Alternatively how long would it have taken to make a copy of this database (they clearly had time to do this twice!) and delete the unnecessary fields in one go (seconds in MS Access regardless of how many records), so that they only had the ones that the NAO needed.

So, am I missing something, or is government so caught up in it's own methods to see the obvious.

Please, anyone, feel free to enlighten me!