Troubled Birmingham City Council, which was declared effectively bankrupt last year owing in part to a disastrous Oracle implementation, has awarded t

Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout

submited by

Style Pass

2024-07-08 13:00:05

Troubled Birmingham City Council, which was declared effectively bankrupt last year owing in part to a disastrous Oracle implementation, has awarded the tech giant £10 million ($12.8 million) for additional professional services.

In a contract award notice published late last week, the council said the deal - worth £9.987 million - started on June 4 and is set to end on September 3, 2026.

Birmingham City Council, Europe's largest local authority, failed to enter the new financial year in April with auditable accounting software after a disastrous implementation of Oracle Fusion, which went live nearly two years late and pushed the budget from £20 million ($26 million) to £40 million ($51 million).

The total cost of the project could now be as high as £131 million ($163 million) as it plans to completely reimplement the software "out-of-the-box" after efforts to build a customized solution hit the buffers.

The council initially failed to implement security and audit features in the software, meaning that it has no way of telling if fraud took place between April 2022 and September 2023.