The decision to run down the Child Support Agency raises
questions about millions of pounds of new investment in the
agency's systems.
Last week John Hutton, secretary of state for work and pensions,
said the agency had "failed". He said both the agency and the
policy underpinning it were not fit for purpose and commissioned a
report.
Ministers have repeatedly blamed the poor performance of the
agency on its IT systems, built by EDS, though officials at the
agency have privately told Computer Weekly that they were also
beset by poor quality data, particularly the information held on
claimants and on absent parents.
An independent report published last year, commissioned by the
CSA's parent organisation, the Department for Work and Pensions,
found that poorly paid, demoralised staff knowingly entered false
information into systems to get around software controls, deleted
cases for no good reason and stockpiled claims, not putting them
into the systems for years.
Ministers and officials want to run down the agency's new work
from about 2008 or 2009. They want a report published before
parliament breaks up this summer, laying the groundwork for
legislation that could lead to the CSA taking on no new cases.
But this run-down could mean that the transfer of all the
hundreds of thousands of cases from the agency's old IT to
simplified calculations operated under the new CS2 system never
takes place, despite EDS being paid to provide major releases of
software to help the transfer and make the technology more user
friendly.
One of the most important of those changes was the addition of a
"notepad", which was ruled out in the original design of the
software. Designers of the original system wanted to stop staff
entering free text into a notepad instead of into defined database
fields. This was because free text could not be captured and used
in calculations and case assessments.
But as staff were unable to record details of telephone
conversations, many claimants found they had to explain their cases
anew each time they called the agency. Under a change request to
EDS, a notepad has now been added.
EDS' CS2 system
A new case management system, CS2, was introduced in March 2003,
a month after the Office of Government Commerce conducted a Gateway
4 review of the technology's readiness for service.
It concluded that although there were risks, a March go-live
date was acceptable. The system initially suffered major technical
problems. Although the reliability improved in time, ministers
continued to blame EDS' £456m system for the agency's
difficulties.