Pension portal launch fail sends Capita running to Microsoft for help

Capita has sought Microsoft's help after the launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) left users facing a malfunctioning website designed to process important financial information. The UK outsourcing provider launched the CSPS portal on Monday after winning a £239 million ($318 million) contract in November 2023. …

[nematoad]

They what?

Capita Pensions are taking remedial action through seeking support from Microsoft...

You have to be kidding.

Crapita are turning to MS to sort their problems when MS can't even sort out their own?

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

[HiDard]

Re: They what?

It's a power app.

I'm not kidding, the user portal for hundreds of thousands of active civil servants and pensioners has been done on the cheap by capita using the MS Power Platform.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They what?

Hardly surprising - they tried to run the DWP on Dynamics NAV...

[Wally Dug]

It shouldn't happen, but...

Capita promised that by March next year, the service will have "evolved significantly" by using automation and AI to improve accuracy and efficiency.

"On checking everything over, to ensure that your loved ones benefit to the full extent of your pension, you should book a one-way flight to Switzerland for 29th June 2028."

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: It shouldn't happen, but...

I was thinking "crapita AI? Will anyone notice a difference from their normal performance?"

[simonlb]

Re: It shouldn't happen, but...

At least when the AI hallucinates how crap the service is it will then be correct...

[Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world]

Re: It shouldn't happen, but...

> I was thinking "crapita AI? Will anyone notice a difference from their normal performance?"

Crapita have AI baked into their name - for as long as they take the 'p'.

[Kane]

...after winning a £239 million ($318 million) contract in November 2023...

...they realised they had at least two years to truly cock it up.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: ...after winning a £239 million ($318 million) contract in November 2023...

I suspect they went live with what they had to avoid being hammered with Liquidated Damages. But that still doesn’t excuse the state of it.

[ajadedcynicaloldfart]

"We are committed to further improving the member experience"

Well they have the "advantage" of starting from a low bar (as in fucking subterranean) so there is that!

[Red Ted]

"...the largest ever on-time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK."

It may have been on time, but did it work?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: "...the largest ever on-time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK."

If the scheduled go-live date has passed before it's released and fully working it isn't on-time.

[Doctor Syntax]

Is this the product of vibe-coding or was it written manually by staff whose boss considers they're slacking unless they're working more than 90 hours a week?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was written by Indian sub-contractors who took advantage of the opportunity to take revenge for the Raj...

[Anonymous Coward]

Name and Shame

All providers and sub-contractors should be disclosed when things go wrong.

There's no need to praise them when they go well, as that will never happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Name and Shame

Why down vote, are you too scared to be shown to be useless.

[ComicalEngineer]

Cheapest Option Programmers Outsourced Until Trials [COPOUT]

Crapita's usual MO is to buy up small firms then asset strip them to the Minimum Cost option, ditch the staff and use the cheapest contractors available on IR35 or working for "umbrella companies". These can then be disposed of as necessary and have no skin in the game as they know that their contract can be terminated at a weeks notice.

They will have taken the job on based on this minimum cost resource and will probably have ditched a lot of the programmers by now as it's "up and running".

I know this after Crapita bought out my mate's small network business and then screwed him and his couple of dozen staff over, replacing them with marginally qualified contractors.

I expect that they will turn to Copilot to sort the problems out....

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Cheapest Option Programmers Outsourced Until Trials [COPOUT]

I was subbie to a subbie on a couple of Capita contracts that went well. But they outsourced their development to an Indian company with staff in the UK. From that experience I'd guess that most of those who worked on it will no longer have been in the UK. Every few months I found myself explaining to a new developer that there was a reason for the code they'd not understood and had just removed that gave special handling for names such as O'Neil and that it needed to be reinstated, otherwise their XML was not well-formed.

This, of course, assumes that there were some actual developers and it wasn't vibe coded from start to finish.

[cookiecutter]

Re: Cheapest Option Programmers Outsourced Until Trials [COPOUT]

don't blame the contractors. look at yr rates being offered now. as you've said.. sub contracted to sub contract to sub contract.

an infrastructure architect is probably being charged out at 1100-1700/day by capita, who then pass out down the line to some shit indian firm whov will do it offshore out, if the job needs to be done on the uk is offering it at £400 inside ir35 or a 6 month ftc with 1 week notice, which is ironically the rate that they advertise the offshore cost at (i've seen the pricing documents on CC)

genuinely self inflicted by the crown commercial retards on this.

then you see jobs advertised that need ACTIVE SC, which means these idiots haven't actually done any planning & are hiring at the last minute to get people in, so you KNOW of some outsourcing wanker isn't willing to wait 1-2 months for SC, they've applied that level of shitty planning to the entire project.

zero fucking sympathy for any of the organisations involved. can't WAIT until a bank doing this offshoring or the cabinet office themselves get hacked & ransomwared via an offshore 3rd party and THEN they might understand why UK staff are more expensive

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Cheapest Option Programmers Outsourced Until Trials [COPOUT]

What’s the point of buying a business and then sacking everyone? Unless it’s to buy their current contract portfolio or client base. Mind you that’s pretty much the MO of the thugs buying up local vets and jacking the prices up. Shame that new local independent vets are springing up as a result…..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cheapest Option Programmers Outsourced Until Trials [COPOUT]

Been there, done that. :(

[Vader]

Re: Cheapest Option Programmers Outsourced Until Trials [COPOUT]

Yep, they don't care. Then the blame game starts. Like the PO stuff and keeps going around in circles.

[munnoch]

132,100 complex remediation cases

I presume this is to do with cock-ups in individual account balances not 132k bugs in their platform? Then again...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: 132,100 complex remediation cases

I wouldn't be so optimistic.

[JimmyPage]

Did I read it right ?

They need 500 hundred (five fucking hundred) full time employees (and the use of "FTE" seems a weasel way to smuggle another 1,000 part time employees under the radar).

500 FTEs to do what, pray tell ?

I could reduce that by 90%, by simply using email and dealing with queries properly, rather than the WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING IN 2025 insistence on a phone number with an inbuilt 30 minute wait time.

I'm no great fan of the "UK is dead and doesn't know it" school of politics as espoused by that cunt Farage and his suspiciously foreign cronies. However, it's hard not to think there is some truth in it when I read shit like this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Did I read it right ?

"500 FTEs to do what, pray tell ?"

There's the technical problems caused by the fact that it's Crapita, but there's two other major drivers of pensions workload that weren't within Crapita's control*. First the McCloud judgement, which generates huge amounts of work for many public sector pension administrators because it isn't just a here-and-now problem but is a complex problem that affects pensioners going back many years, and second the government's proposals to shrink the civil service, that mean thousands of people need pension projections of what they might get if they stay, what they will get if they take redundancy, and what options (eg putting redundancy money into their pension).

* Breaks my heart not to blame Crapita, but facts come first.

[KarMann]

Dept. of Redundancy Department

They really want you to know that they had a backlog to deal with, but they really, REALLY want you to know that it was "the largest ever on-time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK."

[frankvw]

More staff isn't the solution

If a company pockets almost a quarter billion pound to build a website (a quarter billion, for crying out loud!!) and then launches an abomination that doesn't work, contains unfinished placeholder texts and obviously has undergone no testing or any other QA process, then the solution is not to hire more keyboard monkeys. This is not a technical problem or staff problem; this is a combination of a.) a complete culture of incompetence, b.) a complete failure of management, and c.) a complete failure of governmental oversight. None of that can be fixed by hiring more operational staff.

[Phil O'Sophical]

by the end of Wednesday, 23,500 members had succeeded in registering on the site.

So, only 1,676,500 to go, then?

[Marjolica]

Re: by the end of Wednesday, 23,500 members had succeeded in registering on the site.

OK, some day later .. I did manage to register today, after a lot of faff.

However at my first attempt the user name and password I registered with didn't work to log in. I suspect my password manager auto-generated password containing symbols they don't accept but there was no list of valid symbols and what I entered was accepted.

Having then recovered my name (that had gone in OK) and reset to a simplified and less safe password I could get in, well except it screwed up when I tried to use Google's authenticator app for a OTP. Finally using SMS OTP worked.

As to the data on the system, while my beneficiaries are in the system OK only parts of my Pay Slip data and P60s show. Headline P60 was for 2023/24 not 2024/25. Asking for the full list of P60s, which included 2024/25 there was zero gross income shown on on all of the P60s, just tax paid, no other info. Pay slips also look incomplete. And retrieving any of this sadly incomplete info took ages.

And this is before they start to use AI...

[Winkypop]

Have at it

Did they publish the test database so the public could do the testing?

[Dwarf]

Rating system needed

Since the government is very fond of rating systems, such as those used to rate schools. How about if they implemented the same thing for the outsourcing companies that they use across all government programmes. Then they could try and work out which ones are no good, so that they don't keep making the same mistake.

The trick is that they need to consider cost, risk and time. Just because it was cheapest, doesn't mean that they will get it right.

You would also assume that with a win on a £239M cointract, they could afford at least a handful of competent people to drive it forwards properly

Given the number of things that have been reported to be visible and wrong, you can be fairly confident that the same sort of level of quality will exist all through the platform.

[Ambivalous Crowboard]

"On time"

If it's not finished, it's not on time.

"Here's your house"

"What? It's got no roof!"

"At least it's on time"

Capita gonna Capita.

[Acrimonius]

Beneficiaries - Tested?

There isn't much on each webpage. Rather a bare bone implementation so easy to test each link. Did they not test the beneficiary option? You would click, and wait and wait and without any message at all it woud just stop and pretend nothing had been clicked.

[ICL1900-G3]

Pre IT

With so many 'ftes' employed to make this work... hopefully... one cannot help but wonder how many clerks it took to perform a similar pre-IT role.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pre IT

Probably far fewer, because the system would have been more straightforwardly designed to begin, and permanent staff would be habituated.

There's a tendency to think that computers can handle unlimited complexity for free, doing automatically what would take millions of clerks when done manually.

But in reality, the cost appears firstly up-front in the price of computer programmers, and then again each and every time there is a further change to the way the computer needs to work.

Once you add in the regular use of gig workers as developers who have no consistent experience in a particular domain of administration (and the automation of it), in some cases using cheap offshore labour who don't even have the same cultural background, then naturally quality sinks, and costs and headcounts soar.

[Chris 239]

Misspellings.

You've misspelt Crapita throughout this article!