Failed €40m e-project - Yet another big waste of public funds

IN A long line of government white elephants, tens of millions of euro in taxpayers’ money have once again been shamefully squandered.

This time, the waste involves the coalition’s much-vaunted project to provide a one-stop-shop website to make it easier for the public to access information about government services.

Having cost the taxpayers a huge €40 million so far, the scheme is in the process of being scrapped. Instead of streamlining communications for the public, as the ambitious “e-Government” project was supposed to do, www.reachservices.ie has turned out to be an extremely costly online misadventure.

Unveiled in a blaze of publicity in 2003, it was not until December 2005 that the project was finally delivered — 16 months behind schedule and almost three times over budget. It all sounds depressingly familiar. Other costly government failures include the electronic voting debacle, the multi-million-euro botch-up involving the HSE computer system, and a series of large public construction projects that were wildly over budget.

Criticism of the blunders involved in reachservices.ie were strongly voiced in 2007 in a scathing report from John Purcell, the comptroller and auditor general, who revealed that six months after the initial deadline for the scheme had come and gone, only half of the projects were fully operational. He also disclosed that 23 of the 141 flagship projects to provide government services online had already been abandoned. By mid-2006, a further 44 were only partly implemented.

Ironically, many of the services being offered by the website mirrored those already being offered on the website of the Citizens Information Board.

The Department of Finance has finally shut down most of the services being provided by the website. A review of the project has recommended that the website be shut down and the information contained on the portal be merged into other existing websites. Though a skeleton service can still be found online, it merely offers two links to the Revenue website.

The latest fiasco provides further proof, if it were needed, of a glaring lack of joined-up thinking in successive administrations led by Fianna Fáil, the country’s biggest party, the longest in power, and the most wasteful by a mile when it comes to squandering taxpayers’ money.

This appalling scenario represents yet another example of the lack of accountability in both government circles and the public service. If a debacle on this scale were to happen in the private sector, we can be sure heads would roll. In contrast, however, those responsible for the latest mess will probably end up being promoted.

Already suffering from the painful experience of one of the most ill-thought-out budgets in the history of the state, people have become so cynical about government bungling, they are unlikely to take to the streets in protest over the scrapping of a badly bungled project that was costing about €15m a year to run.

Perhaps the only positive aspect of this costly affair is that by winding up its abortive online scheme at this late stage, at least the Government will avoid going down the road of pouring good money after bad.