The report, ‘Managing and replacing the Aspire contract’ was published on 22 July and examines HMRC’s management of its ‘Aspire’ contract with Capegemini, which accounts for 84% of the department’s total spend on ICT and includes HMRC’s major taxation systems, printing, desktop computers, telephony, data centres and networks.
It sets out a a “lack of challenge in objective setting, re-scoping and renegotiation which illustrate a lack of rigour in HMRC’s commercial management of the contract.”
It recommends that HMRC “should urgently invest in its operational, technical and commercial skills.”
It calls on HMRC to “act quickly” to have the Aspire contract replaced by 2017. Initially projected to cost £4.1bn over the 10 years from 2004, the contract has ended up costing £10.4bn.
HMRC wants to let a new contract and earlier this year launched its Aspire Replacement Programme, which aims to develop its future ICT capability.
However, the report says HMRC has by this month “produced limited information” about the programme.
An HMRC spokesman said: “HMRC has one of the largest outsourced IT contracts in the world, enabling us to deliver a very wide range of services to more than 50 million customers.
"We are committed to delivering all this for the minimum cost to the taxpayer. As the NAO report recognises, the Aspire contract helped the department to collect almost £506 billion for the UK in the last year alone as well as improving services to customers.
"The NAO also recognises the progress that HMRC has made over the last two years in developing in-house technical skills, so that we are less dependent on external suppliers. For instance, we recently opened a new Digital Delivery Centre in Newcastle as part of our digital transformation programme.
"We will continue to improve the performance of the contract over the next three years."