SUSI ‘bad planning’ cost €5.9m in year one

Bad planning, outsourcing core services with no contract, and inadequate staffing contributed to student grants agency SUSI’s disastrous first year of operations that cost €5.9m — more than three times its budget.

Thu, 16 Apr, 2015 - 01:00

Niall Murray, Education Correspondent

Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) took over the system for all new applications in 2012 as part of City of Dublin VEC, now City of Dublin Education and Training Board (CDETB). However, students experienced long delays getting their grants, with many forced to wait until early 2013.

A special report by Comptroller & Auditor General (C&AG) Seamus McCarthy says certain elements were poorly planned, with no proper benchmarking of the likely volume of business or work required. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform sanctioned establishing a grant-awarding body on condition that staff be redeployed from elsewhere in the public service, but the process started in late 2011 and took much longer than expected.

“Staffing was 60 below the level planned in February 2012,” the report noted.

By summer 2012, only 13 of the 36 positions expected from the process were filled, and it took 17 months for the full level of redeployment to happen.

If there was enough testing of the process, the C&AG report says other approaches might have been identified, including deferral of SUSI’s launch for a year. Instead, it went ahead but only opened to applicants on June 11 2012, three months later than first envisaged.

Core services of managing applicant’s documents and handling calls — two elements that came in for most criticism — were outsourced to private firm Abtran in late 2011. The 320,000 calls it received from June 2012 to March 2013 was more than twice the expected number, and almost three times the expected 25,000 emails were received.

The C&AG report reveals, despite the company beginning work for SUSI in January 2012, a contract was not signed until February 2013, contrary to public procurement procedures.

CDETB told the C&AG that penalty terms for failure to provide required levels of service were not possible without a baseline of national processing levels, or corresponding rewards or incentives. But the report points out that the first year of processing grants was mostly finished when the contract was signed, and contracts outsourcing other public sector services do have performance-related clauses.

It highlights the fact, in its first year, 11% of SUSI grant decisions were appealed —compared to an expected rate of just 1% — and 74% were successful.

“This raises issues about the quality of assessment and the level of quality control,” said the C&AG’s office.

The report says any benefits from centralising the grant system from 66 councils and VECs can not be measured because the cost and performance of the previous system were not established. Many improvements have since been introduced, including a dedicated SUSI website and information-sharing with social welfare, tax and other agencies.