Government to review its contracts with Atos after IT failure

Cabinet Office to probe Atos outsourcing deals

The government has committed to review £500m worth of contracts with controversial outsourcing company Atos, following a major IT failure.

The Guardian reports that the Cabinet Office said the government will undertake a full review of every contract worth over £10m that has been carried out with Atos.

The move indicates that the government is frustrated with the performance of the French outsourcing firm, which has been blighted by numerous project failures.

One of the most prominent issues encountered by Atos was the exit of its healthcare division from a contract under which it carried out the Work Capability Assessments, which checks if benefits claimants are fit for work.

Atos's latest fiasco concerns its role in the implementation of the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES), an IT system designed for NHS organisations to extract data from all GP practice computer systems in England.

The investigation stems from the National Audit Office (NAO) discovering a botched planning and procurement process leading to costs for the project escalating from £14m to £20m. Atos had a key role in delivering a tool to manage data extraction but according to the NAO is had fundamental flaws and did not work.

This prompted the public accounts committee to investigate Atos' role in the project and said it did not show an "appropriate duty of care to the taxpayer" and acted only within its own short-term interests.

Atos has defended itself against such accusations saying it was not able to see the entire project it was contracted to work on.

An Atos spokeswoman also told Computing that it was unable to test its part of the system in a live environment because it did not have access to components provided by other organisations. The company Atos claims the system delivers 40 extractions per year, but the NAO noted only NHS England has received data from the GPES.

Regardless, as a result of the failure, the committee urged the government to probe Atos' relationship with the UK public sector as its major supplier, with the goal of ensuring such mistakes do not happen again.

While it is rare for the Cabinet Office to probe a single supplier, its plan to investigate all Atos' contracts with the government could spell further bad news for the company, given it is currently working HM Revenues & Customs, the Department of Health, the Ministry of Justice and NHS Scotland.

However, Atos appears to be willing to submit to probing from the Cabinet Office, judging by a spokeswoman's comment to The Guardian.

"We look forward to working with the Cabinet Office with whom we have a transparent and open relationship and we look forward to maintaining our green rating for delivery across Whitehall," she said.

While Atos is in the Cabinet Office's sights, it is not likely to be the only major IT supplier and outsourcing form with government contracts likely to come under scrutiny.

The government's supposed ambitions to move away from major deals with large enterprises and its goal to bring more development ad support of digital services in-house, is all part of the efforts of the Government Digital Service to drive more digital services in Whitehall and reduce its IT costs and inefficient projects.