Tata says hello to £14.5m 1-year contract extension for UK child support system, while DWP figures out how to procure a new one

The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a £14.5m year-long contract to Tata Consultancy Services without any competition. The deal is an extension to TCS's tenure running the department's Digital Children and Families service technology estate, and primarily its Child Maintenance Scheme (CMS) System, which went …

[Anonymous Coward]

That system is absolute rubbish. It's taken and are ready for this... 3 years, yes 3 years to finally get my CM payments right and even then I'm not sure they are. If universal credit can get real time access and work our my wage versus benefits then so should CMS. Moving from Analyst to retail and soon back to analyst has been an absolute nightmare. They base the numbers on the previous years wage unless you inform them which I did on every occasion however they still asked me to pay more than I was actually earning. In fact they told me not to pay in a letter as I offered to do the calculation myself. The fun part is getting it all corrected is not as simple as one would expect by looking at earnings for the year, no, they have to put a change through on every single change. £14.5m for a system that essentially doesn't do the job it's supposed to. Then on the other side you have people actively avoiding paying it by squirreling it through dividends which they could easily resolve by looking at filed company accounts. I want to pay towards my kids but they made it nearly impossible until now.

[alain williams]

They sent me a refund once ...

to an address in Dewsbury - I have never lived there, I live some 200 miles away. I only found out when I asked for a subject access request (data protection act). They refused to refund me as it was more than 6 years ago and claimed that, somehow, I should have known about it.

If you deal with them only do so in writing; what they record on their computer is not always what is said on the 'phone.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The lesson learned from that disaster was....."

....actually nothing. We'll be reading the same old tired shit years from now.

[JassMan]

@AC

Which disaster is that? The disaster that is CMS or the hundreds more disasters that this government is creating every week by awarding contracts without competition.

By signing Public inquiry into Covid-19 pandemic immediately with the aim of saving lives https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/331877 maybe we can get them to learn at least 1 fact about actions without plans.

[IGotOut]

Have they ****s be paid?

I mean all the final servants in charge of these things?

I mean we read "because of covid" so many times.

Is that

A) because they are all getting covid and are off ill for 52 weeks?

B) They have all died.

C) They are incompetent and unable to work without being micro managed in the office

D) They are a bunch of lazy buggers, sitting at home spending all day arrange books for the weekly Zoom call

E) They have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.

Yes we know the answer.