Suppose you’re the minister responsible for criminal records. You receive a letter telling you British citizens have committed a series of rapes, including of children, while in Germany - and administrative breakdown means their details haven’t been put on their police records. You’re told this is only the tip of the iceberg. Do you:

a) notice this sounds serious and ask for a full briefing

b) worry that some of these offenders might have been cleared to work with vulnerable people because of the gaps in the data - and divert officials to immediate investigation

c) write back saying “Thanks for the information. Keep up the good work.”

If you picked c) then congratulations: you’re fully qualified to take up Joan Ryan’s job as under-secretary of state at the Home Office.

The full report into the mess-up over offences committed abroad was released yesterday, and the headline revelations - there was a “collective failure” except on the part of ministers, apparently - have been all over the news.

But reading the whole report reveals a few more gems of Home Office chaos.

1. Not only did Britain spend 10 years ignoring notifications of offences committed by citizens abroad, we’re also rubbish at sending our notifications out. We send 2,600 a year, but this is “only a small percentage” of the convictions of foreign nationals.

2. There is no procedure in the Home Office for officials to brief their replacements when they get moved to a new job. So, though one official tried to set up a system for dealing with notifications years ago, he moved jobs after two weeks and the whole project was dropped.

3. ACPO’s letter (the one mentioning the German rapes etc) took 49 days to make it to the desk of a policy official. And another 14 for Joan Ryan to reply.

4. The Home Office has lost the letter in which they commissioned ACPO to be responsible for foreign offence notifications. All they have is a letter from the losing bidder, the Scottish Executive, saying how miffed they are they didn’t get the job.

5. No-one (the emails go between a whole bunch of officials) had any idea if VAT was payable on the fees, and ACPO had to withdraw their invoice and replace it with a grant application to get out of it.

Bored yet? Disheartened? I know I am.