Last month, I blogged on a bizarre series of corporate cock-ups, including one where Ernst & Young had gone and lost a laptop containing confidential information of its customers. The list of customers included Sun Microsystems, Cisco and IBM.

Now there's a report from The Register adding BP to the list.

Now we learn that Ernst & Young has sent out a letter to 38,000 BP employees in the US, telling them that a laptop theft had exposed their names and social security numbers. Ernst&Young has tried to put their minds at ease by telling them that the information was password protected. Yeah right! That would have gone down like a brick parachute. Any thief who knows what they are doing would take a few minutes to crack that one.

What the clients really want to know is how come confidential information was just left sitting on the laptops, and why is it that Ernst&Young staff felt it was okay to just leave the equipment lying around for someone else to pinch. Maybe someone there is handing out stupidity pills.

Difficult to say how many people have been affected by this latest piece of breathtaking corporate stupidity, taking into account all the companies involved, but The Register report says it runs into the hundreds of thousands.