Carving up the IT contract behind £500bn of annual tax collection is a very risky move The thankless nature of IT service provision is often demonstrated by the fact users only tend to notice it when it goes wrong: if there's no screaming, then it's working fine. In that respect, at least, HM Revenue and Customs' £10bn IT contract with Capgemini and Fujitsu has been a success. Particularly if one considers the …
This post has been deleted by its author
"there is a lack of desire to hire and pay a decent wage to those with them."
From the article and a little bit of old, possibly outdated knowledge of the rules and regulations around local govt and civil service hires, they can't just offer any old salary and benefits package to a prospective employee. The job has to be specified and classified and the rate then comes from the approved table of salaries.
Changing this would require legislation changes or at least a fairly major overhaul of the salary and job comparability tables.
So they can push the salaries as much down as they can? I've seen this made by banks (hey, you don't want to pay those who actually manage your money the same wages of the clueless user who uses the system, right?), companies like Accenture, and many others - keep IT people salaries down, IT doesn't run your business and almost the world, does it?
"...they can't just offer any old salary and benefits package to a prospective employee..."
Not if they're employed as civil servants, no. However HMRC have formed a limited company (RCDTS) to employ the people they're taking from Aspire through the not-quite-TUPE process. This means they can pay whatever they like.
Unfortunately they still have to go to CabO to get everything signed off, so the salaries aren't *that* much better than civil service standard, and the pension terms are pretty crap.
Given that the guys they really want (the people who've been doing this for 15-20 years and know complex+critical systems like PAYE/RTI and VAT inside and out) are all on their third TUPE and have managed to wrangle both good private sector salaries and public sector-esque terms + pensions, the uptake has been unsurprisingly low.
The vast majority of people who've taken the deal are junior staffers who were underpaid by Cap/FJS et al anyway (think sub-£20k). The logical consequence of this is either they're going to have to bring in the experienced bods as time hire contractors at extortionate day rates or they're just going to have to bring in the incumbent suppliers anyway. This is currently being labelled the "co-sourcing" option; same staff, same suppliers, but the paperwork will be shuffled so that HMRC will take delivery responsibility*.
*Judging whether HMRC have the capability to deliver after 20 years with no in-house IT whatsoever is an exercise left to the reader.
"Lack of skills has been named as one of the biggest blockers to the government realising its "digital transformation" ambitions."
And there's even fucking less of them around now the, err, government has just kicked loads out.
You just couldn't make this up.
No, what we need are massively simplified human beings. In this context, massive simplification means removing all the body except the head, and then redistributing the remaining mass into a sphere.
Look, "...risks and costings..." are "...drawn up..." by the treasury "...and presented to parliament..." for the existing system. Here's one here. We have the OBR and various independent think tanks who analyse the budget too. And despite that, we've grown a banana republic system.
There are obvious things that could be done to improve it. It would be sensible to eliminate NI, but it would be a brave politician to close backdoor income tax. And VAT is a mess, but David Cameron has just won plaudits for complexifying it further (eliminating the "tampon tax"). And there are no doubt many loop holes for high earners and big coporations, but fixing them means shoving a wedge in the revolving door between accountancy firms and the treasury.
It could probably even be simplified a bit for us peons. But, like the welfare budget, any tax system that is fair will have hair because we are not simple. And shaping the tax system is a good way to shape the economy and make us pay for our negative externalities. So I don't think there are massive savings in IT to be made from a tax system, unless you're in to some libertarian nonsense of a single flat-rate tax for us all.
"a massively simplified tax code"
They just did that. Taxable benefits are no longer submitted to HMRC for them to calculate and reduce your tax code. The employer now does all that for them (ie that function has been outsourced for free!) and new entries on your payslip will show those deductions. Things like company car benefit, medical schemes etc no longer reduce your headline tax code.
The correct solution is a massively simplified tax code
Whilst that might be a better option overall, it's not what we've got. What we have is a fairly complex tax code. And that is the sort of thing at which computer-based systems can excel.
Given that we have a need, and we have a potential solution, we can only gaze in wonder at the ability of the Civil Service to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, once again...
There is a job to do. Pissing about trying to get it done by underpaid office juniors is only going to cost us all a fortune. It's time to get the right people, pay them the right amount, and get them to do the right job.
Vic.
Where do I book for tickets to be a fly on the wall at the various crisis meetings in 5 years time?
You might well ask, given the Aspire contract isn't due to end until June 2017 and I think it is highly likely HMRC will exercise the option to extend it for a further 5 years; particularly given the current lack of any real procurement process - necessary if contracts are to be awarded and sensible handovers to occur.
I think that we can all agree that the IT that supports collecting taxes is probably a mission critical government system. It was expensive, but it worked well - would we rather have had cheap but a pile of crap?
In my experience, there are no mission critical systems that are both cheap and good quality You get one or the other, and if you're unlucky it is both expensive and crap, especially in Government IT.
Indeed, particularly when what people are quibbling over is the profit margin.
If £1.2bn represents a profit margin of 15.8 per cent, and some think that is too high and suggest that an overall margin of 5~8% is more reasonable then what people are complaining about is circa £600m (about one year's contract costs). Now put that into the context of the circa £5000bn of tax revenue across the same period (10 years x £500bn pa)...
It's also worth noting that it isn't *that* expensive. The gripes about cost usually come in when discussing the original planned cost and the actual realised cost - there's a difference of about a factor of 2. What these discussions usually miss is that Aspire isn't a contract, but a purchasing framework. If HMRC are doing something technology-related, it goes through Aspire first. Go back in time 10 years and you didn't have online self-assessment, you didn't have RTI, you didn't have flashy graph analytics catching tax dodgers, you didn't even have HMRC as a single entity. That's where a huge chunk of the cost growth has come from. It isn't over-budget, the amount of stuff that was going to be bought was under-estimated.
Just put it next to NPfIT or UC to see what expensive really looks like.
That's where a huge chunk of the cost growth has come from. It isn't over-budget, the amount of stuff that was going to be bought was under-estimated.
We shouldn't forget that HMRC also under-estimated their TUPE'd pension liabilities by about £3bn, which is included in the £10bn figure.
"It was Aspire that connected the web forms to the backend systems... :)"
I think you must be thinking of a different generation of online self-assessment. I distinctly remember delivering the GovRules web services to support electronic filing from EzGov while I still worked for EDS, before I moved to Cap. <Checks CV> Yep.
I look forward to trading in the monolithic method of managing my personal transport (otherwise known as a car) in favour of a series of smaller contracts with component suppliers - because a pile of bits on the garage floor is much better at getting you to the supermarket. After as, as us IT types know full well, integration is the easiest part of all projects, isn't it? Or at least, so the voices in my head tell me.
I purchase transport in a lot smaller contacts: bus tickets, train tickets, spares for my bicycle.
But how small a contract? You could pay the individual component fares for each leg of a journey as incurred, However, I generally buy my regular train tickets as a weekly/monthly season tickets, because these are significantly cheaper, more convenient (no queuing at ticket counters/machines at peak times etc.) and more flexible. Yes on those occassions my plans have changed and I don't make full use of the ticket I loose out, however generally I've found it more often works the other way...
I had a chat with a friend who is involved in this.
The words "monumental goatfuck" came to mind when all this seems to be is a paperwork exercise to spread the contract about rather than change anything.
The issues of legacy systems and bloated bridges between systems will likely end up costing a shed load so the current incumbents are probably pleased to leave with the 15% margin they had before it gets reversed by a few years of negative margin when they fix the really old stuff.
It won't end well
Looks like a fair few comments are starting from the premise that all government decisions are wrong. There have been any number of El Reg comments on other contracts on the lines of 'I could have bodged up a better system in my shed' and 'why oh why does govt keep giving contracts to the same big firms?'. And it's not as if any incumbent supplier ever got complacent, or tried to justify keeping a increasingly antiquated IT architecture going, because they are reputationally invested, and know the next contractor will take one look at the spaghetti of uncommented goto loops, and start muttering about 'What cowboy built this...'
Hey!
Back in 2005ish I was the one who built that MS Access system. I'll have you know I actually had a paper copy of the MS Access 2.0 manual from 1994 as my main reference.
Last I heard I was the only one who bothered to keep a copy of the documentation, including the 1994 manual.
When I was first taught Java EE in my degree I actually hankered back for the simplicity and clarity of VBA.
The NAO report on the DEFRA debacle. GDS's arses were well kicked. I suppose that's why the Gov delayed publishing its Digital Strategy. They wanted to wait until people had forgotten that GDS has officially been declared about as useful as a steam-powered dildo
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
