Oracle Project Woes at Europe's Largest City Council Deteriorate
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Europe's largest local authority faces a $15.58 million (12 million) bill for manually auditing accounts which should have been supported by an Oracle ERP systems installed in April 2022.
The 3.2 billion ($4.1 billion) budget authority has become infamous for its ERP project disaster, which has seen its switch from legacy SAP software to cloud-based Oracle Fusion, a customer win co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison once flaunted to investors.
The delayed project left the council without auditable accounts, and without security features, along with costs climbing from around 20 million to as much as 131 million. The IT problems contributed to the Birmingham City Council becoming effectively bankrupt in September last year.
A report from external auditors stated the council will not have a fully functioning cash system until April next year, three years after it went live on an Oracle ERP, and will have to wait until September 2025 for a fully functioning finance system.
Yesterday, Mark Stocks, head of public sector practice at external auditors Grant Thornton, told councillors that officials had told him the new accounting out-of-the-box" system might not be ready until March 2026, nearly four years after the failing customized system first went live.
The lack of a functioning accounting system was making it costly and time consuming to produce a full audit, the auditors concluded after exploratory work.
[...] Problems with the customized ERP system were multiple, but cash management, bank reconciliation and accounts receivable were of particular concern. The council has bought third-party software - CivicaPay/Civica Income Management - as the replacement for the banking system.
Stocks said officials had been working hard to improve the current Oracle system, and said he did not lose that message."
Nonetheless, serious issues continue. You're not going to have a fully functioning finance system and cash system [until] April next year. The actual financial ledger could be April 2026. That's really difficult from a finance officer point of view [and] it's particularly difficult from an external audit point of view to draw a conclusion on your accounts," he said.
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