The Coalition Government has sought to bring in Universal Credit for those receiving benefit. However problems with IT have delayed national roll-out. And a watchdog says that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has not achieved value for money in its early implementation. In early 2013, the Department was forced to stop work on its plans for national roll-out and reassess. Over 70 per cent of the £425m spent to date has been on IT systems. The Department, however, has already written off £34m of its new IT systems and does not yet know if they will support national roll-out. For instance, the current IT system lacks a component to identify potentially fraudulent claims so that the Department has to rely on multiple manual checks on claims and payments. Such checks will not be feasible or adequate once the system is running nationally.
Why does this matter – except that lack of IT expertise and management controls have fouled another Government reform? Briefly, Universal Credit is as the watchdog the National Audit Office NAO put it in their recent report on the story so far, ‘a single payment consisting of a basic personal amount with additional amounts for disability, caring responsibilities, housing costs and children’. The Coalition hoped that the Credit would reduce administration costs, fraud, error and overpayments, by billions of pounds a year. The Government proposed to spend a couple of million on bringing in the Universal Credit. HM Revenue & Customs would tell the DWP what claimers earn. A ‘fraud and error programme’ has £750m budgeted for it in the DWP for the years 2012-15. Without IT, the DWP ‘will be unable to make the savings it had planned’, the NAO noted.
Fraud system
The Universal Credit planned to use a system called IRIS (Integrated Risk and Intelligence Service) to assess the riskiness of online transactions and allow Universal Credit to fast track low-risk claimants, add additional checks for other claimants, or prevent transactions when there was a high risk of fraud. That hub was developed by DWP with HM Revenue & Customs, seeking to reduce fraud and error across government. As the NAO report said: “The Department was unclear about how far its security solution depended on the IRIS ‘trust’ component, which assesses and establishes confidence in a user’s identity. The Department did not know what would be required to make it work in combination with other security components, what information would need to be exchanged or how the risk rating process would really work. The pathfinder uses an interim solution because the Department has delayed development of a strategic risk and trust system.” And how to be sure of the identity of online users? The NAO reported: “In December 2011, the Cabinet Office decided that the proposed solution was too expensive and unfit for cross-government purposes. During 2012, the Department continued with developing its own solution but there were delays in securing funding and finalising the tender …”
Besides guarding against fraud, by checking bank account details and addresses, the Universal Credit IT systems would need to guard the honest claimants against cyber-threats. The IT will need to be accredited by the Computer Electronics and Surveillance Group who assess whether any government IT is secure. However, as the NAO pointed out, the ‘original security designs were over complex and could not be accredited’. The IT guys are trying again.
For the report in full visit the NAO website – http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/10132-001-Universal-credit.pdf
What NAO says
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office (NAO) said: “The Department’s plans for Universal Credit were driven by an ambitious timescale, and this led to the adoption of a systems development approach new to the Department. The relatively high risk trajectory was not, however, matched by an appropriate management approach. Instead, the programme suffered from weak management, ineffective control and poor governance. Universal Credit could well go on to achieve considerable benefits if the Department learns from these early setbacks and puts realistic plans and strong discipline in place for its future roll-out.”
