Dept of Finance suspends use of Government's new accounting system
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The Department of Finance has suspended the use of the Government’s new public service accounting system for its central exchequer fund due to concerns over its “performance and functionality”.
The department, which manages the State’s bank accounts, “made the decision to pause” the transfer of the exchequer to the new Financial Management Shared Services (FMSS) system last September, according to the latest report into the public accounts, published on Friday.
The transfer remains suspended, with the department citing concerns with FMSS’s reporting reliability and a “reduction in staff productivity” which had resulted from the new process involved with raising procurement and the use of online forms for same.
The department had been among a first wave of State agencies with ‘simpler’ systems for which the FMSS was rolled out in early 2022.
In the six months following the rollout of that first wave, “most of the users formally expressed... their dissatisfaction with elements of the system’s performance and functionality”, the report said.
FMSS was first commissioned in 2016 on a budget of €47m, with an expected go-live date of 2020.
However, by 2019 the project, which aims to replace 31 financial reporting systems within 52 Government bodies with a single centralised interface, was already several years behind schedule and subject to more than €10m in cost overruns.
The following year, the government agreed to a proposal from the then public expenditure minister Michael McGrath that the system continue to be developed over an additional five-year timeline with an expanded budget of €115m.
It has now emerged, in the report on the system prepared by the Comptroller and Auditor General, that it is once more heavily beyond schedule, with no savings to be elicited from the new streamlined system for at least 10 more years.
The C&AG said that “no formal cost benefit” analysis was prepared by the National Shared Services Office (NSSO) — the agency with responsibility for the implementation of the FMSS — at the time the project was expanded in 2020, while the memorandum for Government which approved the expanded project “did not include any detailed timeline or key milestones” for the system’s deployment.
It had initially been expected that the system would eventually lead to savings of circa €15m per annum.
However, “no calculation of savings that have been delivered” is available as of this month, the C&AG said, despite some 65% of the project’s total budget having been spent to date.
The NSSO said that the second rollout wave — of four such waves planned for the system — which was due to have been completed as of this month will now be delayed until at least the end of 2024.
Meanwhile, the contract with the current contractor charged with the implementation of the project is due to expire in September of next year, with the NSSO currently “planning to tender on the open market for a replacement contract”.
The C&AG recommended on foot of his own investigation that the NSSO should “document and formally agree a timeline for the remainder of the FMSS project and share it with relevant stakeholders”, and “recalculate” the project’s likely savings, suggestions to which the agency agreed.
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