Top civil servants have defended Accenture after it helped to
deliver a "fundamentally flawed" £350m IT system to pay EU
subsidies to farmers.
Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), told MPs yesterday:
"The people responsible for the fact that the IT system was not as
good as it should have been were the people who commissioned it as
much as Accenture."
The defence of Accenture came when the House of Commons'
Public Accounts Committee (PAC) met to question Ghosh and Tony
Cooper, chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency, on the
Single Payment Scheme.
Labour MP Alan Williams asked Ghosh and Cooper whether Accenture
should pay compensation for a disastrous system that pays subsidies
to farmers under the Single Payment Scheme.
Cooper said that officials had so poorly specified the system
that it had no facility for changing the entitlements for each
farmer.
Statements are sent to farmers each year which set out the
amounts they are entitled to. The
rates in 2009 are higher than 2008 entitlements.
Cooper said that something "pretty fundamental was missing from
the original specification".
He added: "When the system was delivered out of the change
programme in 2005/6 it did not include the functionality to be able
to change entitlement or to transfer entitlements, and that is a
fundamental aspect of the scheme. We therefore had to invest to
retrofit that functionality into the system."
Ghosh, who as head of Defra has overall responsibility for the
Rural Payments Agency, said that one main problem with the IT was
that Accenture delivered what it was asked to deliver. "What they
[Accenture] were asked to deliver was the wrong thing."
When asked if Accenture should pay compensation, she said: "I
feel that one might have a bank of solicitors breathing down one's
neck. We are not saying they [Accenture] were incompetent in what
they built. They built what they were asked to build Somewhere
between the specification of the business process and the checking
and the quality assurance, it broke down.
"There is no reason Accenture should have known that about
entitlements, for example. We don't believe that that was
negligence of their part, subject to any point a lawyer may make to
me."
Costly systems
The system went live at the Rural Payments Agency in 2005 to pay
the right amount of subsidy to farmers under the Single Payment
Scheme.
But public spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO)
said in a
report published on 15 October that the agency's systems are
"very expensive", "cumbersome", difficult to change to keep
up-to-date with new policies, and are in danger of becoming
obsolete.
The systems are only four years old. Accenture has
100 contractors working full-time on the systems. Each one cost
taxpayers £200,000 in 2008/09. The Single Payment Scheme costs
about £1,700 per claim, which is six times the cost in Scotland of
paying subsidies to farmers.
MPs on the committee yesterday were angry at the amount of money
wasted on IT and other overheads. Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO,
told the committee that the Rural Payments Agency has spent
hundreds of millions of pounds more than it expected on IT and
other overheads to administer the Single Payment Scheme.
The committee's chairman Edward Leigh warned Cooper that the
committee may take the unusual step of naming him in its report on
the scheme. Normally the PAC avoids criticising named civil
servants in its reports.
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