UK fears financial turmoil at IT giant could have ‘severe’ effect on PIP and NHS

The Government has held secret talks over the financial turmoil facing a major contractor that could spark severe disruption to public services, i can reveal.

Concerns are growing about cash flow issues affecting French IT giant Atos, which has almost a billion pounds’ worth of UK government contracts.

The extent of the financial difficulties faced by Atos’s UK arm are not known but the French parent company admitted in April that it was facing a wall of debt amounting to €3.9bn (£3.3bn).

Secret internal Government documents, seen by i, warn of “severe implications” for the continuity of “critical” public services, such as benefits payments and NHS appointments, should the firm’s UK arm collapse.

The Government is scrambling to line up an alternative IT provider that could be called upon to provide these services for major departments such as the NHS, Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions, i has learned.

The Cabinet Office has been working on contingency plans since February, with experts examining the extent of the supplier’s financial difficulties and how the delivery of “critical” contracts can be protected if it cannot recover, the documents show.

While the extent of Atos’s work in Britain’s public sector may be unknown to many, it includes the delivery of disability benefit assessments for personal independents payments (PIP), and running the technology behind the Student Loans Company and for NHS records in hospitals across the UK.

It also runs a critical and sensitive Home Office file sharing system, provides IT services for the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice and runs critical software testing for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

If the contractor’s financial problems hit its ability to provide services to the public sector, the Government is concerned there could be disruption to NHS appointments and the sharing of health records, as well as delays to the assessments that help determine benefit payments, court trials and tax refunds from HMRC.

The documents reveal that the Government recruited leading advisory firm PwC to work with the Cabinet Office on a risk assessment project codenamed ‘Project Aztec’.

PwC was asked by the Cabinet Office to assess the likelihood of the contractor surviving its financial difficulties, and if it does not, what the impact of its collapse would be on the running of key services in the public sector.

The French company at the centre of the crisis is not named in any internal Government documents, but the parent company, based in Paris, is referred as ‘Aztec Group’, while the UK subsidiary is codenamed ‘Aztec UK’. i has been able to establish that the firm referred to is debt-laden French tech group Atos.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Way back in the 1970s and 1980s, the British government was still shoulder-tapping choice young men and not for their integrity or intelligence but to assist with making sure power was retained through big computer systems.

Those young men are now old and desperate.

They still have the vulnerabilities that made them give up their lives to exciting infiltration. The gay men are liberated, except for their treachery. So still vulnerable.

The organised paedophiles, the child pornographers, the drug traffickers … this is the system set up, firstly to hide sex crimes, then to hide secondary crimes, then to dismantle the legal system because that’s the only way to keep hiding it in legal proceedings …

The Post Office scandal must be a shock. Poor old crooks.

I am strongly of the opinion that government IT systems should not be created or managed by external consultancy firms like Atos, cap gem, or any other of these fleecing thieves of tax payers money.

I have with worked with several of these companies and government projects for them is like a cake maker selling a wedding cake. Same cake but add a zeros to the price. Then chuck the junior consultants on the project at eye watering rates.

The biggest issues are that public sector have no idea what they are doing when it comes to IT and IT purchasing. They don’t know how to manage the projects, the vendor, or understand the requirements of the operation, or functionality of the system they are buying.

As a ERP consultant / project manager for 25 years I shake my head in despair at the horror stories of public sector IT projects.

Ironic that Atos has failed it’s work capability assessment.