Birmingham council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle debacle

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/birmingham_oracle_cost/

Posted by 457655676

9 Comments

  1. Article mentions the bank reconciliation module in Oracle fusion, it’s absolutely awful even in the vanilla version. Wonder why they couldn’t just do that manually instead of doing nothing for 18 months.

  2. Asleep_Mountain_196 on

    Remember this at the 2026 council elections…reward this particular Labour councils continued borderline criminal incompetence at your own peril.

  3. the_boat_of_theseus on

    Imagine having the audacity to blame the Tory government when you’ve spent that amount of money out of pure incompetence.

    Prison for life would not be enough for these people.

  4. armitage_shank on

    Feel like I’m in for a roasting here but surely this is a civil service issue, as much if not more than an elected official issue. The report states that the elected officials weren’t even told of the Oracle issue for 13 months. What are they even supposed to do once told? Do they have any expertise in payroll software? Of course not – they’re relying on civil servants to inform them.

    The equal pay issue is kind of BS but also not IMHO really the remit of a councillor. I don’t think the councillors are even paid.

    This is a massive failing, to be sure, but it’s a massive failing in “day-to-day” running: making sure the employees are on the correct contracts is not the job of a councillor. This is back-office stuff.

    They’re not “all over their brief”, but when you’re relying on retirees and part-timers I don’t think you can really expect them to be experts in software procurement or employment legislation. That’s the job of the civil servants.

    I’m all for “the buck stops here”, but solving the problem correctly requires correctly identifying the failing.

    Maybe it’s an altogether bigger problem with how local government operates. Quite massive budgets, little to no accountability given the numbers on which these people are elected, but basically FA remuneration for anyone to do the oversight job properly.

  5. Mistake #1: you gave Oracle money 

    If there was a top 5 worst companies is the world, four of them would be Oracle. 

    (The other one is EA)

  6. Grumpyoldman777 on

    I heard that a particular NHS trust spent millions on software and is in red, but no one actually covered it