‘The tax authorities spent 203 million euros on a failed ICT project’

The Tax and Customs Administration is said to have lost an amount of 203 million euros to a failed automation project, the development of which took many years. The system should have collected all taxes and paid out all fees.

The NRC writes this on the basis of internal documents from the Tax Authorities, which have not been released publicly. At the beginning of this year, it would have been decided to stop the development of the so-called ETPM system after it has been in development for many years. 203 million euros has been spent on the computer system over the years and development was already started in 2005. Only at the beginning of this year was the House of Representatives informed about the failure of the ICT project.

As early as 2009, it would have been considered to discontinue the development of the new computer system, according to the NRC. The project is said to have had major problems for years. It is also unclear what the considerations were for continuing the development in 2009, but probably the large amount that had already been spent on the project at that time was reason not to stop it; Initially, the costs were estimated at 60 million euros, but in 2009 it turned out that 160 million euros had already been spent.

Despite the failure of development, the ETPM system is still used on a limited scale after part of the software was delivered in 2010 at a cost of 175 million euros. After that, 28 million euros was spent on maintenance, repair and further development, according to NRC.

According to the sources of the NRC, ETPM is used for about 1 percent of the transactions and about 3.5 percent of the total money flow within the Tax and Customs Administration. It is unclear whether the system will remain active: the documents show that the Tax and Customs Administration found it irresponsible to use ETPM for collecting taxes and paying benefits.

The ETPM system was an automation project for collecting taxes and paying benefits. The system should have processed 260 million transactions with a combined value of more than 200 billion euros. The Tax and Customs Administration has been under fire for some time due to problems with ICT, which have led, among other things, to problems with the payment and granting of allowances.