South Wales Evening Post - 18 September 2008
More than half a million pounds of rate-payers money went missing because Swansea Council mistakenly paid some of its bills more than once.
A report into Swansea Council's finances revealed a total of £614,000 was paid out twice for goods and services in error — and points the blame at part of the authority's controversial eGovernment system.
Swansea Council said most of the money has now been retrieved.
But thousands of pounds remain outstanding, and questions remain over whether the money will be recovered.
The revelation follows an investigation by auditors PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which concluded that flaws remained in "modules implemented as part of authority's eGovernment system"
Councillor Michael Hedges, who sits on Swansea Council's finance scrutiny board, said: "The report reveals there were four potential bills that they were unable to say whether had been paid or not.
"The council did not know whether they had been paid once or twice. That is chaos.
"For the auditors to describe 'significant weaknesses' is very strong language.
"These are not teething problems — these systems have been in place for years. Some of this may not be recoverable, and there are millions of pounds on the computer system."
The council's controversial £83 million eGovernment programme was introduced in 2005 with the promise it would deliver £17 million worth of efficiency savings for the authority.
But the savings never materialised, and the authority is currently in negotiations with city IT firm CapGemini about how much it will have to pay out after abandoning its payroll project.
The PriceWaterhouseCoopers report identified a number of "ISIS modules", implemented as part of the e-Government programme, where "a number of significant weaknesses continue to exist."
It then revealed that under those modules, the "sundry debtors/revenues and receivables; and purchase ledger/ purchasing and payables", a payment for £614,000 was made twice by mistake in August last year — because invoices could not be found.
Last week, Council leader Chris Holley told council critics of the system to "get off the bandwagon".
A spokesman for Swansea Council said: "The vast majority of the duplicate payments were quickly recovered and the council is taking steps to ensure that the remainder is paid and there is no loss to the council taxpayers of Swansea.
"The duplicate payments were quickly identified by the council's staff and immediately looked into.
"Measures have been put in place to recover the outstanding £7,773 and procedural steps have been taken to ensure that it can't happen again."
