The National Audit Office (NAO) has criticised HMRC for being too slow to provide data in relation to an assessment of the technology used in its VAT systems, saying this raises questions about the department's ability to develop its long-term planning.
The criticism comes in a short report on the impact of legacy IT systems on HMRC's VAT services, one of a series of assessments which NAO is publishing to provide guidance for government departments on how to handle the risks posed by an ageing IT infrastructure.
The NAO describes the VAT ICT systems as 'robust and stable' and says the latest available statistics show that they were achieving 100% availability in four of the last five months of 2011-12, and 99.8% in the other month, January 2012.
However, the NAO points out that HMRC was still providing data 'in the very late stages of finalising its report and several months after it had originally been requested. 'As result of delays in supplying financial data, NAO says it was prevented from verifying costs and forming clear conclusions.
The report concludes: 'For performance information, we saw indications that HMRC has a good set of data that it uses in its day to day management. However, we were unable to fully confirm this finding or obtain sufficient data to allow us to conclude on the performance of the VAT service. The challenges we faced in obtaining data from HMRC suggest that it may face challenges in robustly planning for the longer term.'
An HMRC spokesman said: 'HMRC provided NAO with a large amount of data for this study, and the majority was provided in good time. However, HMRC acknowledges it took longer than it should have to provide some of this data. This was for a variety of reasons, including that HMRC wanted to ensure all of the data was as robust as possible and that it was in a format that met the NAO's needs.'
In its report, the watchdog also warns that while HMRC has successfully extended the life of its legacy VAT ICT systems through enhancements, it is likely to face difficulties in the future in sourcing staff with the necessary technical skills, including Virtual Machine Environment (VME) and COBOL, to keep the systems going.
NAO says HMRC will need to develop and retain expertise in what it describes as 'the unique complexities and characteristics of the VAT ICT systems', and says the department is currently running an exercise to recruit a number of mainframe developers and implement succession plans and knowledge transfer activities.
