The Australian Customs Service’s (ACS) perpetually delayed Integrated Cargo System (ICS) has gnawed through $43 million dollars in emergency funding and nearly sent its department to the wall, evidence tendered at a Senate Budget Estimates hearing revealed yesterday.
In an increasingly tired and emotional late night sitting last night, Customs’ top brass of CEO Lionel Woodward, CIO Murray Harrison and national director of business systems Jenny Peachey gave evidence that despite the ICS having a recidivistic chronology of failure, the system must and will come right - at some stage in the future.
For the benefit of those living in budgetary present, retiring Customs CEO Lionel Woodward told the hearing he estimated “large slabs” of the $43 million emergency funding afforded to Customs this financial year would be eaten up by current efforts to shift workable ICS code to industry.
Responding to questions from Customs Shadow Mark Bishop, Woodward submitted there had been “a number of pressures in a number of areas in relation to the build of the integrated computer system,” along with the “the Customs Connect Facility (CCF), the connection facility that will enable outside connection using either EDI or interactive methods” to connect to Customs’ declarations system. Woodward said the final amount of the shortfall was not yet known.
Woodward said that according to interim figures “total pressures” amounted to a spend of $35 million for ICS code cutting, another $20 million for connectivity courtesy of the CCF and, “while the CMR project continues” the need to maintain “the old Unisys mainframe” costing $1.25 million per month – or $15 million for the “full year”.
Asked how deep ICS had sunk Customs into red ink, Woodward said, “The costs of the ICS and CCF are a significant contribution to our being over-extended,” and that the $43 million figure was not so much “an over-run, but an [interim] cash injection”.
The committee heard legislation has already been passed to allow Customs to pass on the cost of ICS to industry users in the form of an import declaration processing charge.
ICS chief Jenny Peachey told the hearing that a “major contract variation” between the IT vendors hired to develop ICS for Customs had impacted the project to the tune of around $15.4 million dollars, especially as the project was “completing”.
Peachey said the last stage of ICS development (known as R4 or imports declarations) had experienced a slippage of “19 days”, adding that for the “final part, all the code is cut now for the ICS development. It’s in product test that final part” – nominating the end of April or early May 2004 as the nominated date for the “rollout”.
The May code release date is at variance with earlier statements from Customs that code cutting would not be rushed to meet over-ambitious deadlines.
ICS development was ceded to a consortium led by Computer Associates, IBM and a number of other subcontracted firms including Kaz Computing after being stripped from EDS in 2002.
Visibly frustrated with the frequently complex answers of successive commonwealth officers, Customs Shadow Mark Bishop labelled some of the evidence tendered before the hearing as “the biggest load of rubbish I have heard in my entire life”.