How to wire the health service at a fraction of consultants’ fees alone

HAVING worked in the IT industry, I was amazed at both the cost overruns and the fact that the ‘health service computer system’ may need to be scrapped.

To add insult to injury, the taxpayer has been forced to pay €70 million to consultants, and even they couldn’t sort it.

The simple challenge was to install a system that would pay salaries and wages for 100,000 employees nationwide. This is a pretty straightforward project. The software would be a database module, requiring three to four months of programming to reflect different grades, tax scales, allowances, special payments and all the other relevant calculations needed to pay the staff.