Crash course

I have some native sympathy with the lackeys struggling to handle the Inland Revenue’s computers which, like a berserk one-arm bandit, have just spewed out an excess £1.9 billion in tax credits. I am not sure I am the best-qualified person to expound on the inadequacy of government IT systems. My own computer bears the large indelible bootprint of the Clark school of systems technology. It was imprinted a fortnight ago when the machine crashed, erasing two years’ worth of work, or at least sending it somewhere deep into the bowels of the hard drive where it could only be recovered by the kind of forensic nerds who do kiddie-porn investigations. It is fair to say that if I were put in charge of some government computer system, it would have found some way of transferring the nation’s currency reserves to Botswana before I finally took to the thing with an axe.

But something tells me that the government’s super-nerds ought to have a slightly better affinity with computers. And at present there is scant sign that they do. The fiasco of child tax credits is merely the latest in a long list of government computer failures. Last November the Department for Work and Pensions’s computer system, built by American IT contractor EDS Systems and Microsoft, crashed during an attempt to upgrade it. A £50 million Capita IT system designed to handle the government’s Individual Learning Accounts had to be scrapped in 2001 after it was discovered to be fatally open to fraud. There was the Passport Agency’s computer breakdown in 1999, and the failure of the Home Office’s notorious computer system for handling asylum applications, which led to a huge backlog of applications and the resulting wave of illegal immigration, in 2000–01. That is not to mention the Probation Office IT system, which was scrapped after £120 million had been spent, nor the NHS computer system, whose costs have already run to more than three times its original £6.2