After weeks of newspaper disclosures and political turmoil swirling around the expense accounts of MPs, the British authorities finally published their own version of the accounts on Thursday, but with crucial data blacked out.

The expense claims have forced legislators and ministers to quit, the latest of them on Wednesday when Kitty Ussher, a junior Treasury Minister, resigned over allegations published in The Daily Telegraph that she had avoided capital gains tax worth around $27,000 through the practice of redesignating a second home as her primary residence. Under Government rules, legislators may claim up to $38,000 a year to defray the costs of a second home. The Daily Telegraph said Ussher had re-designated a second home as a primary residence before selling it.

Ussher, 38, announced her resignation on Wednesday evening after The Daily Telegraph’s disclosure appeared on its website. She said she was leaving to spare Gordon Brown’s Government embarrassment and would not seek re-election to Parliament. But she insisted that she had acted within the law.

The newspaper has been basing weeks of disclosures on an unedited official database it obtained about legislators’ expenses. “More than a million printed documents and receipts have been scanned electronically over the last year in a major publishing operation to make information on MPs’ allowances freely available to the public online,” the website said.

Many details, including, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and descriptions of expenses items, were blacked out on security and privacy grounds.