The federal government has abandoned a long running upgrade to the system used to calculate welfare recipients’ eligibility and payments after pouring $191 million into the tech project over the last four years.
As revealed by InnovationAus.com, the project had been on pause since last year after not only hitting technical barriers, but also being linked to an alleged lobbying scandal, and running out of funding.
Government Services minister Bill Shorten on Monday confirmed the scrapping of the Entitlement Calculator Engine, which had “nothing to show” from the $191 million spent on the project.
The cancellation came as Mr Shorten unveiled a new user-centric approach to policy development and implementation with less reliance on vendors and consultants.
“I can announce today that Services Australia has taken the decision to write off the calculator as an asset,” Mr Shorten said. “It was a decision not taken lightly, but the agency could not keep throwing good money after bad.”
The Entitlements Calculation Engine is a Pegasystems-based platform developed to replace Centrelink’s 40-year-old mainframe-based income security integrated system as part of the seven-year Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation program.
Indian tech giant Infosys had led the Entitlement Calculator Engine project since 2019 when it won and initial standing offer and a $18 million contract for proof-of-design work. The company subsequently won additional contracts worth close to $150 million.
But in 2021 the Services Australia took the systems integrator role back from the company after what Infosys said was a “significant scope and scale issue” with the project.
The contracts with Infosys are believed to be part of an alleged lobbying scandal involving a consulting firm,Synergy 360, linked to former Government Services minister Stuart Robert.
Limited reviews of the procurements linked to the scandal have found deficiencies in the tender processes and the matter is still being investigated by agencies and the Parliament.
Infosys paid Synergy 360 around $16 million in fees over several years, as it won multiple lucrative state and federal contracts, which Mr Shorten has described as “a very, very serious issue”.
The Entitlement Calculator Engine project also suffered from “siloed thinking between policy and implementation” that made user centricity difficult to achieve, Mr Shorten said on Tuesday at the AFR Government Services Summit.
“Policy is important. We need big ideas. We need people to think about how to deliver a government’s agenda,” Mr Shorten told a crowd of public servants and technology and services vendors and consultants”.
“But implementation is equally important or government simply doesn’t work.
“Somewhere along the way, I worry that the intellectualism of policy development has been elevated to a position of superiority over the practicality of implementation. And yet, starting with implementation means starting with the user.”
