The troubled project to replace Australia's child support payment system drained its budget within two years, forcing the federal government to draw on other funding to continue an upgrade that has left staff still using obsolete technology.
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Department of Human Services officials overseeing the IT overhaul have admitted it depleted its original $102.3 million budget by 2015-16, and had to find more money in its business-as-usual funds because the project is still not working as expected.
Despite the cost blow-out, the arrival of its new Pluto payment system for the national $3 billion child support program in April 2017 was followed quickly by complaints it was slower and clumsier than the obsolete system it was meant to replace.
Human Services told a Senate committee investigating controversies marring the Coalition government's tech upgrades that the department's business-as-usual spending in 2017-18 hit $4.95 million by February.
Departmental spokesman Hank Jongen said the child support system’s business-as-usual budget had not increased. It spent $7.5 million in 2016-17 and $6.69 million the year before, when its child support IT upgrade funding ran out, and $6.84 million in 2014-15.
IT News first reported the department used up its budget for the tech upgrade in the two years after receiving the funding in 2013-14, and told senators it was unable to determine how much extra money it had spent bringing Pluto to its current form. Last month Fairfax Media reported only nine of 70 of Pluto's processes were working as intended.
The project has missed its original early 2018 deadline and staff have resorted to using Pluto as required, but checking through its predecessor, Cuba, that their work has been executed and notes stored correctly.
Fairfax Media reported in April that Pluto was yet to become a "minimum viable product" — a stage at which enough of the system was ready for basic functions, allowing it to be built further.
Pluto is the fourth technological fix to be tried since the then-Labor government announced in 2013 its intentions to replace Cuba, which dates back to 2002 and was obsolete more than four years ago.
It is understood that since Pluto's arrival, call response times have blown out from under the target of three minutes to seven minutes in recent statistics, and Human Services is putting staff on shifts with more time answering its child support phone lines and less for their regular work.
While the department denies the roll-out of Pluto is "the primary cause" of Child Support's growing call wait times, staff have vented their frustration and blamed the system for the deteriorating statistics.
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The child support system suffered a crash that left staff unable to use its IT systems for four business days in March.
Public servants have had to apologise to clients over the phone as they wait 30 seconds for screens to load — much slower than Cuba — and have been told off by bosses for trying to use the predecessor instead.
Human Services is paying consultants Deloitte $491,000 to assess Pluto in a review expected to draw heavily on feedback from staff using the system.
A parliamentary inquiry has probed the new child support system among other tech headaches and disasters for the Coalition government including the "Censusfail" saga and repeated ATO IT meltdowns.
