Outsourcing Toolkit

EDS investigations revealed

Kable

Published: 16 Feb 2005 12:40 GMT

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has investigated IT supplier EDS four times over the past three years, a Freedom of Information (FoI) Act request has revealed.

The OGC commissioned a first investigation from accountant firm Deloitte into the troubled IT supplier in 2002 and a second in 2004 along with two of its own internal financial reports. The Deloitte reports are known as Ranger I and Ranger II.

The existence of the reports was admitted in an FoI disclosure published on 11 February 2005. But the OGC is not publishing further details of the reports, saying that a further disclosure would be a breach of confidence and is covered by the exemptions in the FoI legislation.

A spokesperson for the OGC said no information further than that published in the disclosure is available.

"As it is FoI, we have decided to put this information on our website," an OGC spokesperson told Government Computing News. "We won't be doing any additional briefing on this. Other than what's on the website that's all we are saying."

The Sunday Times newspaper had submitted the FoI requests, targeting EDS as it has suffered much criticism over high profile government IT failures during the past few years. Most notable is the Child Support Agency, which MPs have demanded should be scrapped amid a backlog of unprocessed claims.

Despite losing out on lucrative deals in some areas of the public sector, such as the NHS National Programme for IT, EDS is still fighting to regain its prominent position in the UK government sector and is competing for the £4bn Defence Information Infrastructure contract, due to be announced this month.