Government pushes ahead with work on Centrelink payment system

Accenture has been chosen as the lead systems integrator for the first part of a program to overhaul Centrelink’s payment system.

Human services minister Alan Tudge said that the selection of the company as preferred tenderer for systems integrator services on the first phase of the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT) Program was still subject to commercial negotiations.

DHS is currently planning a range of WPIT-related projects including a new online user interface for welfare payments, a new payment utility to deliver payments faster, and work on designing an end-state technology solution for future phases of WPIT.

The government said in October that Capgemini and Accenture were shortlisted for the role.

Along with Accenture, Capgemini, IBM and HP Enterprise are all members of a panel that will provide systems integration services for WPIT.

WPIT will be one of the largest welfare ICT transformations in the world, according to the department.

SAP is the preferred core software vendor for WPIT. The program involves replacing government’s mainframe-based welfare payment infrastructure, which was first installed in the early ‘80s.

Early work by DHS as part of WPIT has already improved processing of some payments, Tudge said earlier this month.

The minister said that changes undertaken as part of WPIT reduced Youth Allowance and Austudy claims on hand from 80,000 to 35,000, htrough rejecting claims earlier due to incompleteness or not meeting basic eligibility criteria.

The average processing time of Youth Allowance and Austudy claims from nine weeks to under five weeks, the minister said.