The Health Services Executive (HSE) is to suspend the roll-out of a controversial €150 million computer system following serious concerns about its quality and value for money, writes Liam Reid Political Reporter.
Fundamental problems have been identified in the system, which was meant to have controlled the pay and other personnel records of more than 136,000 staff in the health sector, but which failed to identify, in one instance, a basic mistake where an employee had been paid €1 million by mistake.
Fine Gael is now set to use the issue in a major political attack on the Government's spending, and will accuse it of failing to identify problems with the system, which it claims was originally costed at €8.8 million.
Meanwhile, chief executive of the HSE Brendan Drumm is to recommend to his board at a meeting on Thursday that the work on rolling out the system, called PPARS, or Personnel, Payroll and Related Systems, should be suspended until a complete review takes place.
The Comptroller and Auditor General is also finalising a report to be published in early December, which Prof Drumm is expecting to be highly critical.
The Irish Times understands that the system will have cost €150 million by the end of this year, and more than €230 million if fully implemented.
Despite this, less than one third of the people within the health system, or 37,000 people, are covered by it at present.
After he took up office in August, Prof Drumm ordered an internal review following internal complaints and reports about the system, which failed to identify a mistake where one staff member was paid €1 million in error. The mistake came to light when the staff member reported the overpayment to superiors.
Last July, when news of the overpayment emerged, the HSE blamed it on "human error". It said PPARS was "working well and will be extended to all staff ".
In July Tánaiste Mary Harney said she had asked for a report from senior staff at her department on the project.
"If we have got it wrong we must put our hands up," she said. According to her spokesman, Ms Harney has yet to receive that report.
Last night Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, who is expected to raise the controversy in the Dáil later today, described PPARs as "a farce that will make the money wasted on e-voting seem like small change".
"A project initially costed six years ago at €8 million is now heading towards a completion cost of a quarter of a billion euro because of chronic planning, management and oversight. We get to see why under this Government health budgets are increased while front-line services still suffer."
A highly critical internal technical report from last year identified the overpayment and a series of other fundamental problems with the system.
The report stated that there were "fundamental errors" in how the project was set up, and warned that the system "cannot be changed without a major refit of the whole design and configuration".
It also said that the security of the system "must be reviewed as a matter of urgency" after it was found that confidential information could be sent to people who should not have access to it.