Birmingham City Council needs a further £45m to fix ‘disastrous’ Oracle system | Computer Weekly

▤ Summary

A document posted online ahead of Birmingham City Council’s cabinet meeting shows that more money needs to be ploughed in to fix its Oracle system. In April last year, city council leader John Cotton gave an interview to the Birmingham Mail, in which he described the “disastrous” Oracle system, which has left taxpayers with a £100m bill. In the report, he wrote: “Simply put, the system is still posting transactions incorrectly and significant manual work is required to ensure that the finance system is accurate.” This, he said, has led to an additional six-month delay in closing the prior year accounts, as the finance team needed to manually adjust inaccuracies in the ledger, to ensure transactions were posted to the correct cost centres. Sebastian added that forecasting needed to be done manually, due to what he described in the report as “continuing issues with the accuracy of the finance ledger (which finance staff have to manually correct), as well as the delay in implementing system modules that would have enabled budget holders to view and forecast their budget spend more easily”. Sebastian stated in the report that an additional £45m spread over two years is needed, on top of the current operating costs of the Oracle system.

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