Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

 1) Letter from Dave Hartnett, Acting Chairman of HM Revenue and Customs to Jane Kennedy, Financial Secretary to the Treasury. 

2) Chancellor's statement to the House of Commons

3) Summary of report of the Independent Police Complaints Commission

Comment - and does Poynter report say anything about HMRC's £8bn ASPIRE contract?

The Poynter report is the best thing that has happened to HMRC for decades. It highlights the institutional weaknesses the department has always denied existed. It should lead to changes in IT and culture that HMRC's board of directors could not have brought about otherwise. One hopes among other things that the board will be humbled by the Poynter report and not continue to be obsessed with its public image.  

Meanwhile the institutional weaknesses identified in the Poynter report raise worrying questions about how well the department is able to manage an £8bn "ASPIRE" outsourcing contract with Capgemini, which was worth about £3bn at its start date in 2004.  There have been many changes and additions, but it's uncertain whether the extras are, or will,  prove value for money.

The Poynter report - some highlights. [Comments are taken directly from the report apart from the sub-headings and my explanations in brackets. When "my" or "I" is used, this refers to Kieran Poynter, the chairman of PricewaterCoopers, who wrote the report.]

At a conference on spin, PR and government press officers last week, I was asked to speak briefly (a challenge).

I said I had noted over about five years an increasingly aggressive approach on the part of some government communications directors - with some honourable exceptions.

I said: "We often get supplied incorrect information. We know ministers are given incorrect information...the Prime Minister has even been given incorrect information about the NHS computer system". This is not usually the fault of press officers but is sometimes the responsibility of senior civil servants or advisers who brief ministers - or who brief press officers. 

I said on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme this morning (approx 8.30am) that the loss of a memory stick by PA Consulting raises questions about why a private contractor had access to government data on 84,000 criminals. Does this mean private companies will also have access, on the quiet, to patient-identiable information under the NHS's National Programme for IT? I also said that there is so little independent scrutiny of the government machine, and so much secrecy, that the only time systemic failures come to light is when there is a, well, systemic failure.  

When civil servants announced they had reached £71.25m settlement with IT services supplier EDS over problems with tax credits IT systems, they left out some important details.

After tax credits were introduced in April 2003 - supported by a new system built by EDS, the main IT supplier to HM Revenue and Customs at that time -  thousands of families were unexpectedly overpaid. HMRC sought to claw back the overpayments while struggling to reduce delays in making payments to hundreds of thousands of families.

In November 2005 HMRC announced it had reached a settlement with EDS on compensation for the IT problems over the introduction of tax credits. But what was not mentioned in the announcement was that EDS was being quietly allowed to pay £26.5m of the settlement from any future business it won from the UK government. Under the deal it would pay quarterly instalments of 4.5% of income from future government work over three years.

The time is up in December this year. But EDS has not won the contracts it had hoped for from the UK government, leaving it well behind on its payments, Computer Weekly has learned.

Now the Labour Party's conference, which was held in Manchester, is finished, I've looked at the lessons and what went wrong on 13 large, government IT-based projects and programmes:

HM Revenue and Customs says it's normal to have "open cases" - unresolved tax e-records - at the financial year end.

But the number of open cases - 20 million - is a record backlog. It means there are millions of PAYE employees who have paid an incorrect amount of tax and HMRC won't know how much has been under or overpaid until it has reviewed the open cases manually.

Reviewing them is the challenge. The following plots the rise in the number of open cases:

HMRC open cases

1998:  2.5 million

1999: 4.8 million

2001: 8.5 million (at which point 1,250 extra clerical staff were hired to reduce the backlog)

"Aspire has been fully engaged with IMS [information management solutions - part of HMRC] trying to meet the three Quantum objectives since early April.

"During [this] time the nature of the challenge and potential for solutions has clarified.

"Aspire is absolutely committed to continue the journey to deliver success for HMRC on Quantum.