THE head of the Child Support Agency was yesterday driven out of his job for overseeing a shambolic IT system that has left millions of single parents waiting for £750 million of overdue payments.
Doug Smith was effectively removed from his post by Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who may now scrap the computers at the centre of the fiasco.
The CSA claims processing system was installed early last year by Texas-b
ased EDS, the government’s single biggest IT supplier, which has been at the centre of a string of other public sector failures.
MPs on the work and pensions select committee yesterday heard the litany of failure at the CSA that has left many single parents out-of-pocket and angry.
Some 478,000 parents have applied to the CSA for support since the new system was installed. To date, only 61,000 of them have received any money.
Waiting times for claims to be processed have soared as high as five months, far beyond the agency’s target of six weeks.
The total backlog of payments due to parents is £750 million.
Despite costing more than £450 million, CSA staff have reported that the new IT system regularly freezes, "locking" applicants’ records and forcing them to calculate and record payments by hand.
Sir Archy Kirkwood, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the Commons committee, said: "Nobody who has given evidence has had anything constructive to say about the situation, either as professionals, academics or clients."
In a defiant resignation statement, Mr Smith insisted that he had not failed, instead arguing that had it not been for him, the chaos at the CSA would have been worse.
"I think I and my senior management team have done a good job over the last year to mask the worst impacts of this IT system from the people who really count in this, who are our clients who are looking for money to support families in adverse circumstances," he said.
Despite Mr Smith’s insistence that he was leaving his post of his own accord, ministers yesterday made no secret of their anger with him. "It isn’t acceptable, but there will be new leadership of the CSA," Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the Commons yesterday. "We will have to sort out the computer problem that has been the cause of the problems at the present time."
Mr Johnson said that he was considering the "nuclear option" of giving up on the EDS project outright. "It’s not an easy option, but the system’s not working well enough to discount that," he said.
The government is effectively fining EDS £1 million every month over the CSA failures, and the company insists that its performance at the agency is improving.
But the disasters at the CSA may turn attention to EDS’s record in delivering on British government contracts.
The company is responsible for the Inland Revenue's delayed tax credits system, which will not be fully operational until March 2005.
In 2001, an EDS payments system for the Ministry of Defence almost collapsed, halting salary payments to 80,000 employees.
