Capgemini to keep the legacy lights on at HMRC for £245.5M The UK's tax collector has awarded tech consultancy and service provider Capgemini a contract worth up to £245.5 million to keep legacy systems up and running. The award brings the French outsourcer's potential windfall from His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to nearly half a billion pounds in the last two and a half …
"HMRC has one of the largest and most complex IT estates in Europe with over 600 systems, 800 terabytes of data, 1,000 IT changes a month, and a 24/7 IT operation. It serves 45 million citizens and more than 5 million business taxpayers."
So how do countries with a much larger population manage with apparently less? Does the German tax office close its computers at 4pm daily?
From gov.uk
according to the 2021 Census, the total population of England and Wales was 59.5 million, and nearly two-thirds of people (37.5 million) were of 'working age' (aged 16 to 64 years)
If they serve 45m citizens (that they know about, excluding Albanian car washers and Turkish barbers) what about the 14.5m of the population they are ignoring? Are children not on the tax register for income they may get? Pensioners would be and surely they are taxed?
"So how do countries with a much larger population manage with apparently less? Does the German tax office close its computers at 4pm daily?"
Why do you assume they manage with less? Published World Bank assessments in their World Governance Initiative series rate the government effectiveness of the UK as similar to Germany (actually the UK was a tad better, but not by much), materially better than France, Spain, much better than Italy and well ahead of eastern European countries. It may or may not surprise people, but there's a very strong correlation between government effectiveness and how much they spend, with few real outliers which suggests that all countries have their failings. I've worked for a couple of German companies, anybody who believes Germany is imbued with Teutonic efficiency clearly doesn't know the people or the nation.
The Germans and Swiss-Germans I've worked with are often the living embodiment of "If it ain't broke then keep your damn hands off on pain of death!". Literally have to pry things from people's hands in order to get mandatory security patches installed, this causes the obvious issues further down the line where something starts failing 'cos it's not been allowed to be patched and the exercise becomes ten times harder than if it have been updated regularly.
Why did I assume? Well I read the article and "HMRC has one of the largest and most complex IT estates..." suggests that they are in the very top of whatever ranking has been used. So it would be reasonable to assume that other countries MAY do with less, even on a per capita basis. I mean the tax affairs of Finland (5.6m people) are still complex to a degree and need processing (our system seems easier than the UK and tax papers come pre-filled in for checking/correction) so we may have a fraction of the people to process so maybe x% of the server capacity is not needed, but still...
So maybe Germany does what it needs to do with (made up) 75% of that HMRC does. There can be reasons why Germany uses a much less per captita amount of processing. Better processes? Newer systems? Efficiency? Efficient tax code.
You see, I did not state absolutes. Now I could have made it clearer I had made up the claim about Germany but it seems bloody obvious in context.
I might have expected more context (HMRC is one of the top three users of IT, other examples of complex IT estates' that but that is different.
> Does the German tax office close its computers at 4pm daily?
In Germany tax is basically/mainly handled by each of the individual States, not by the central Finanzamt.
Certainly for contactors their tax number is allocated by the state they reside in (and so if they later move to a different state they will get a new tax number), I *think* for employees things changed a while ago to move them to a "lifetime" tax number.
So Germany is probably a bad example to compare with HMRC.
The issue with HMRC is that it exists to employ civil servants while providing a begrudging 'service' to taxpayers.
The IT people implement systems that require humans to intervene in many areas where the IT should be doing the job.
The DSS is even worse. To get money paid back outside of a regular payment requires a team to 25 to manually print out the refund details, hand enter these details into a spreadsheet to generate a reference number and then retype (with the new reference number) into a payment system where a report is printed and the manually authorised. This process keeps 25 people employed - a simple script could replace that team, but never will because they might have to get rid of the team. You could not make it up.
How much of that is a mark up.
How much of the cost is associated with IR35 and thus artificially inflated cost of services and lack of competition?
Given that such system likely will have to be maintained forever, the decision to give it up to private sectors is peculiar to say the least.
I wonder if that contributes to the conflict of interest HMRC has with these big firms. They certainly know where the skeletons are hidden and so HMRC fights tooth and nail to keep IR35 in place so these big corporations (exempt from it) can benefit (no more pesky contractors undercutting them).
The whole thing stinks.
If company subcontracts, they have to apply the rules if the subcontractor is a small business, but they can still make the profit from the engagement, because they are exempt, whereas if small business subcontracts, most likely they can't.
To give an example, if an exempt company get £1200 per day for the worker they supply, they can get in-scope subbie, pay them £600 a day and have the remaining £600 for themselves.
I have a stash of as new, old stock CGA and EGA graphics cards and some obscure FDDs. Not cheap though. Like Mr. Biden, I am adding a modest (17000%) surcharge on anything that has any component on it made in China. Even if it is just a capacitor. You can never be too careful. Reds under the bed etc. Those capacitors may have more to them than meets the eye.
> "HMRC has one of the largest and most complex IT estates in Europe with over 600 systems, 800 terabytes of data, 1,000 IT changes a month, and a 24/7 IT operation. It serves 45 million citizens and more than 5 million business taxpayers."
Is it just me that is wholly unimpressed by these metrics and think that this should be a single to low double digit millions per year contract?
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