‘Government rarely holds ICT companies liable for failed projects’

The government often lets ICT companies that fail in automation projects walk away. While those companies should actually be held liable, they regularly receive their money, says the corporate legal adviser of the Ministry of Security and Justice.

It would have happened at least five times in recent years that Ruud Leether, the corporate legal adviser to the Ministry of Security and Justice, advised a failing IT company to be held liable for costs incurred by the government due to the failure of projects. without any consequences. According to him, these involved automation projects with large budgets and interests. On Monday he expressed the suspicion to the temporary ICT committee that the political leaders were not informed of his advice.

The temporary ICT committee is investigating the failure of major government ICT projects. The second public hearing will be held on Monday. The first hearing, which took place at the end of April, found that more than a third of government large-scale ICT projects fail on a scale that leaves the resulting system out of commission at all.

On Monday morning, Lineke Sneller, professor of Added Value of IT at Nyenrode Business University, spoke about digitization in government. Last year, the government announced its plan to make all citizens’ contact with the government digital by 2017. According to Sneller, it is realistic that concrete steps will have been taken in three years’ time, but achieving the entire target within the deadline is what she calls according to the ANP ‘ambitious and very optimistic in time’.