Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year
The Oracle finance system implemented by stricken Birmingham City Council allocated £2 billion ($2.65 billion) in cash to the wrong financial year, leaving public sector workers to unpick the errors manually.
Europe's largest local authority has been made effectively bankrupt by a combination of the self-inflicted messy ERP rollout and historic equal pay claims. In its latest report to the council's Audit Committee, external auditors Grant Thornton disclosed that Oracle's cloud-based Fusion ERP system, which has failed to produce auditable accounts since its implementation in 2022, continues to cause disruption to the council's financial management and operations.
The auditors found significant risks in cash management in the most recent financial years, for example. Cash allocations posted to Oracle were recorded as a transaction on the same day.
"If the transaction it relates to is from the prior year, this means the cash posting is sitting in the wrong year and the accounting records would be incorrect. In [the financial year] 23/24, £2 billion in transactions [were] posted in the wrong year which required correcting manually," the report says.
