A paper (entitled "Public sector accountability and commercial-in-confidence outsourcing contracts") in this months' Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal goes quite some way to shedding light on why groups like Thanet Council are so pathetic. Examining "commercial-in-confidence excuse so beloved of British politicians."

"The requirement to make all contracts over a low threshold open for public inspection has largely cleaned up Australian Government outsourcing," Professor Allan Barton, of the Australian National University in Canberra told The Register.

"However, some problems remain at the State Government level, particularly in PPP [Public-Private Partnership] contracts. I believe there are many similar problems with PPPs in the UK," he added.

His paper argues that the use of commercial-in-confidence negated the reason for outsourcing in the first place by creating a bubble of secrecy in which abuses could happen, which in turn created inefficiency instead of making improvements.

Reported in: The Register

One need only look at the wastes of money that are both the [[tag:NHS]] IT systems and the (not) "interoperable" benefits and tax system (which limps along pathetically).

One could also point to the embarrassments of the child-support computer system that after going double the budget could not carry out a simple sum that you or I could do on the back of an old envelope.

We could further point to the outage when the entire network of computers at the department of works and pensions was taken out for the best part of a week when a simple standard up grade to a non critical PC somehow went wrong.

While on the subject we could look at how a company banned from working in the USA managed to land the tax and benefits IT contract.

If we leave IT we can ask about Thanet Councils hiring practices and there use of the companies they hire to monitor their own work. We could also ask how a Council tenant came to be assaulted by a council sub-contracted builder when the tenant started to state the work was not up to scratch. We could ask why no independent audit was ever carried out of that work too.

Further more we could look at the tax credits system which was an embarrassment when it started up (and still has on-going issues). We could ask how they manage to not do a simple division each year.

Bob Smith our fictional freelancer manages to work for a year on an unchanging income. He gets tax credits. At the beginning of the year the Tax Credit system works out his yearly entitlement and divide it by the weeks in a year. Most of us could do that in our heads.

Each week Bob Smith gets a tax credit payment into his bank account. Towards the end of the year the amount he gets drops suddenly. He phones up and asks why. He is told that he has not got enough tax credit left this year to continue being paid at the rate he is.

One has to ask how such a simple sum could be gotten wrong. But they do. Bob's story might be made up but the plot is the same for many people on tax credits.

This story was also published by me at: LordMatt.co.uk.