Members of the Public Accounts Committee questioned Customs and Border Control officials Wednesday on how a project to modernise the department’s IT system went from an initial estimated budget of $277,000 to $1.4 million.
The discrepancy was highlighted in an report by the Office of the Auditor General earlier this year.
Auditor General Sue Winspear, in the February 2022 report, also noted that the completion date of the project had changed, from the second quarter of 2021 to December 2022; the report was a follow-up to past recommendations made by the Public Accounts Committee.
She also noted that, despite an undertaking by CBC that a project manager would be recruited to oversee the IT modernisation of the department, no one had been hired for that post, as of February.
Despite stating that it planned to hire a project manager in 2019, as of Wednesday, 27 May, when the Public Accounts Committee met to go over the follow-up report, CBC still had no project manager in place.
However, Director of Customs and Border Control Charles Clifford, who appeared before the PAC at its meeting on Wednesday, 25 May, said “significant progress” was being made in recruiting a manager, not just for the IT modernisation project, but for other projects as well within the department.
He told the committee, “While we had hoped to achieve this a lot earlier, it’s important to point out we did not have a budget for that until this budget cycle.”
Clifford explained that the $1.1 million increase in the cost of the project was due to vastly expanded expectations of the system, following the merger of the Customs Department and the Immigration Department in January 2019. This meant the IT system now had to deal not just with customs-related matters, like import duty tariffs, but also with immigration-related elements, such as landing and entry components, he said.
The new CBC also took on the responsibility of the Sister Islands customs and immigration elements, which previously had been the remit of District Administration, he explained.
Another challenge was transitioning from Customs’ problematic legacy IT platform, the Total Revenue Integrated Processing System, known as TRIPS, to a more stable reliable system, he said. The initial $277,000 budget was envisioned as covering the costs of bridging the way from the TRIPS system, which Clifford said was “constantly crashing” and had a number of “vulnerabilities from a security point of view”, to a new Customs Information Management System, known as CIMS.
He explained, “This project is significantly different today than how it started.”
Clifford said to the committee that he expected the IT modernisation project would be mostly completed by the end of this year.
Both he and the chief officer of the Ministry of Border Control and Labour Wesley Howell acknowledged that, if they’d had the time and ability to plan better, there would have been a project manager for modernising the IT system in place from from the beginning.
Howell said there had been no business case drawn up in relation to the IT modernisation project, but that CBC had now been asked to provide one for the 2022-23 budget.
He told the committee, “If we were able to rewind the clock and go back to the days when Customs started their work. If that was done, I don’t think we’d be discussing cost overruns, because we would have been able to proportion the project in such a way that it had a finite start and a finite end and finite deliverables. … It evolved over the years and took on more capacity and more development in different areas that were not initially envisioned in the original cost.”
He added, “Our work now is to ensure we can document properly and be able to ensure we’re getting value for money.”
He said, in hindsight, the project should have been broken down into separate sections, with separate budgets.
Howell added that the customs tariff IT system was now working far more efficiently than previously.
Related Videos
