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MPs slam defence bosses for computer shambles
The Ministry of Defence has been castigated by MPs for a series of "truly reprehensible" mistakes in the introduction of a new computer system which led to thousands of service personnel receiving the wrong pay and allowances.
The 245m Joint Personnel Administration (JPA) programme was supposed to save an estimated 100m a year by streamlining the payrolls of the Army, the Navy, and the RAF on a single system.
However, the Commons Defence Committee said "basic and fundamental" errors in the way that it was designed meant it was unable to prevent "significant" under and over payments being made.
The problems were so severe that even the National Audit Office was unable to determine the level of error within the system, and was forced to qualify the MoD's accounts as a result.
JPA was supplied by the Texan computer giant EDS, which has been involved in a number of heavily criticised Government IT projects – including the Child Support Agency system.
The committee reported that the personal data of up to one in 10 military staff held on JPA was incorrect. It said that "uncertainties" over the level of error meant that the MoD was now having difficulty recovering almost 29m which had been wrongly paid out.
At one point, fewer than one in three – 31 per cent – of service personnel expressed satisfaction with the system, although the MoD said that that had since risen to 45 per cent.
"It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the failure of the Joint Personnel Administration programme," the committee said.
"At a time when the department is seeking, in many cases successfully, to deal with areas of dissatisfaction in service personnel life, this failure, which affects pay, entitlements and service records, is unacceptable.
"It is, in our view, truly reprehensible that such mistakes were allowed to be made by those charged with oversight of the JPA programme."
The committee said that in developing JPA, the MoD saw it primarily as human resources project and failed to put sufficient emphasis on the need for financial reporting.
"We consider this to be a basic and fundamental error which is unacceptable on a project of this scale," it said.
The problems may have been exacerbated, the committee said, by job cuts at the MoD which saw 300 human resources posts axed just as the difficulties with JPA meant there was a need for more experienced support staff.
The MoD acknowledged that there had been difficulties during the first year of JPA, but said that the situation was now improving.
"Over the last 12 months, significant improvements have been made to the system and further training has been given to service personnel," a spokesman said.
"We apologise for the inconvenience caused by any incorrect payments. We have ensured that any repayments were made in a way and at a level that minimised impact upon them."
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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