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Story URL: http://management.silicon.com/government/0,39024677,39117066,00.htm

"Unreliable" £450m IT system delays child support cash
Tens of thousands of vital payments delayed or incorrect...

By Andy McCue

Published: Tuesday 25 November 2003

Problems with the Child Support Agency's new £450m computer system are delaying payments to tens of thousands of single parents.

The government's own figures, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, show that since the system was launched at the end of March this year only one in three of 152,564 applications for support payments has been processed. Of those just 5,625 have resulted in maintenance payments and nearly one in five assessments is incorrect.

"Technical issues" were also cited by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as the reason for not being able to provide figures on the percentage of people who are not paying what they should.

The system, which was implemented by EDS, has a history of delays and rising costs, and was originally due to be ready two years before its actual launch date. The government is currently holding back 15 per cent of monthly payments to EDS because of the problems.

Steve Webb MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said the system is still suffering from problems and CSA staff are working out assessments manually in some cases.

"It is scandalous that this multi-million pound computer system is so completely unreliable that CSA staff are having to get pocket calculators out simply to keep the backlog down," he said in a statement. "Children are the real losers because of the CSA’s failure to collect and enforce maintenance payments. They are missing out on the cash entitled to them because of government bungling. Taxpayers will rightly question why huge sums of public money have been wasted."

The DWP did not dispute the figures - which are its own - but claimed Webb's attack is "misleading". A spokeswoman for the DWP told silicon.com that around 40 per cent of the 53,058 cases processed have been closed due to the claim being withdrawn.

A Liberal Democrat spokesman told silicon.com that even taking that into account the figures are still bad and that a lot of the withdrawn claims are probably down to people who get fed up of waiting for their claim to be dealt with.

"A lot of these closures are born out of frustration," he said.

EDS declined to comment directly on the figures and referred queries back to the DWP.