Capgemini wins £107M HMRC extension – no competition needed • The Register

UK tax collector His Majesty’s Income and Customs (HMRC) has awarded Capgemini a £107 million help and companies deal, with out competitors, beneath a relationship that began greater than twenty years in the past.

The French outsourcer is being rehired to supply enterprise software help and upkeep companies for a set of “business-critical HMRC functions.”

The present deal was agreed in 2022, and is designed to “present decommissioning and functions modernisation companies for functions in scope,” an official discover stated this week.

The modification will proceed to help that course of “to fulfill preliminary contract goal making certain that key enterprise functions and companies are modernized and prepared for future market engagement,” the notice said.

The modified contract is scheduled to finish in 2027, bringing the entire worth beneath the 2022 deal to £321.8 million, all with out outdoors competitors. Nonetheless, the entire quantity awarded to Capgemini for the reason that Aspire challenge was first created in 2004 is rather more.

The UK’s Inland Income, now a part of HMRC, first signed the ten-year Aspire contract with Capgemini – a joint cope with Fujitsu and BT – which value the general public purse £10 billion between 2006 and 2016. Aspire was the biggest UK authorities contract, delivering expertise companies and tasks. It changed a earlier contract with EDS and Accenture.

In 2016, HMRC set out to replace the Aspire IT contract through a procurement that was expected to interest smaller and medium-sized companies, in addition to bigger suppliers, in a transition stated to be fraught with threat. It additionally prolonged the contract by a yr.

In 2016, the Nationwide Audit Workplace stated the Aspire contract had supplied “secure however costly IT methods” and contributed to HMRC’s expertise changing into old-fashioned.

Nonetheless, in 2019, Capgemini said it had won work to supply functions administration companies till June 2022.

“This extension builds on a profitable 15-year partnership between the 2 organisations, which has been instrumental within the supply of companies that underpin the gathering of UK tax revenues,” the agency stated on the time.

Quick ahead to 2022 when creating the present deal, HMRC stated solely Capgemini may help and decommission the functions inside its remit “due to their 18 years of supporting these companies.”

In April 2022, HMRC stated all contracts awarded beneath the Aspire contract would finish by June 30, 2022.

Earlier this yr, joint work between The Register and public sector contracting specialists Tussell showed that since 2020, HMRC had contracted for £3.8 billion in spending with the tech suppliers concerned within the Aspire deal, £591 million of which was awarded with out competitors.

In the previous few months, tech minister Peter Kyle has signed non-contractual agreements with Google and OpenAI in an effort to enhance productiveness in public service, with out saying how they might assist get out of longstanding contractual relationships and transfer off legacy methods. ®