Bob Browning's blog

Last Year some time, someone in the National Audit Office asked for some data about child benefit claimants from HMRC.   The HMRC person asked someone in the IT department who, instead of just running of an SQL statement, passed on the request to their outsource company.   The Any IT person will tell you that running an SQL statement on even a large database such as this would normally be hours of work, maybe a day if the database is complex.  However the HMRC person says she was given a quote of £15,000. 

HOW MUCH!! 

Now I don’t know the detail of course, but all I can say, as a fairly seasoned IT person, is that if a database extract like this takes weeks to produce, then the database must be very badly designed indeed.  £15,000 sounds outrageous and another IT person later said that this must be an error and the real cost should be nearer £5,000.  Frankly this differs from the previous quote in that it is marginally less outrageous.  Five grand is still horrendous for such a simple job.

So instead of spending the money, the HMRC people hit on the idea of using an existing program to produce the data.  Now this would produce more information than required, and some of this quite sensitive.  In any event they did this and loaded the data onto CD and put them in the mail.    As we all know they never turned up and a hue and cry began and some lowly clerical person was hung out to dry as I recall.

It seems that the police have been looking for these disks and now want to bill HMRC £500,000 for their efforts.  Now the lesson you might take from this is that to save £5,000 (or was it £15,000) we have spent half a million quid.  So they should have coughed up at the time.   My take on this is radically different from this.  I am glad that HMRC people are watching the pennies and don’t just roll over when a contractor comes up with something like this.  Granted they should have spent a few quid on a rail fare to send someone down with the disks rather than popping them in the mail – always assuming the disks didn’t join the mountain of government disks, memory sticks and laptops left on trains.  However the basic instinct to make do and mend rather than just cough up was, in my view, right.

My second conclusion is that if contractors are routinely overcharging the government to this degree then the half a million must fade into insignificance compared to the total amount we are all being taken to the cleaners by these guys.  The savings predicted for outsourcing are illusory.  Once a contractor has his feet under the table they are very difficult to get rid of can can hold you to ransom.

Thirdly how can an IT department be called an IT department (actually to be correct the HMRC Information Management Solutions Business Unit) if they can’t do a data extract like this in-house.  I will lay money that instead of just doing it, they prepared a brief, passed it to the contractor for a quote demanding a project plan and who knows what paperwork, and then worst of all, just passed the quote back to the requestor without pushing back.  These guys may or may not be technical incompetents, I don’t know, but they do have a very important roll as gatekeepers who should be negotiating down to bare minimum every quote that comes their way.  The end-user can’t be expected to do this because they don’t know if a quote is good or not.  Did this happen in this case?  It sounds very much like it didn’t.