A Northern Ireland Assembly report claims officials at the Department of Finance displayed “a culture of indifference” about protecting public money.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) investigated the Department’s handling of online services contracts with telecommunications company, BT.
It found that contract extensions increased payments to the company by more than £120 million ($A212 million).
The Department said additional sums paid to the telecom giant were for extra services and projects and were all individually assessed as being value for money.
The contracts related to online services — NI Direct and LandWeb — which were designed to bring “digital transformation” to the Province’s Public Service.
The Assembly report suggested that BT “ran rings around Civil Servants”.
BT said it was proud of its record in delivering more than 35 new digitised services and processing 22 million digital transactions — more than double the original targets.
“Despite the increased costs from additional services BT was asked to provide, independent consultants concluded that contract costs were below market average and within market range,” BT said.
The PAC report said that when the Northern Ireland Audit Office queried significant overruns on the contract it was met with a ‘so what?’ response.
“It was evident to the committee that Department of Finance staff involved with these contracts did not have the necessary commercial skills or experience to negotiate the best deal for citizens or to manage contracts,” PAC said.
The committee identified that in the LandWeb project, the Department did not secure open-book accounting, meaning greater transparency on the part of BT.
It said that, as a result, the Department had no idea what profits were being made by a supplier and was therefore “negotiating blindly”.
“Equally damning was the discovery that, in relation to the NI Direct contract, where open-book accounting was secured, contract management procedures did not extend to routinely examining BT’s books,” PAC said.
“Therefore, Department of Finance had little idea of BT profit margins and the committee was concerned these could be large,” it said.
Belfast, 23 January 2021
