The UK tax collector is awarding Capgemini a contract worth up to £574 million ($741 million) to run legacy tax management systems until 2029, one of which was first built under a controversial arrangement that was supposed to end in 2020.
His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs has published a contract award notice saying the French IT services company won the bidding for “run and change” services for Enterprise Tax Management Platform (ETMP) Enterprise Operations (EOPS). The agreement is worth between £403 million and £574 million ($520 million and $742 million).
The notice says ETMP is “deemed critical national infrastructure and is the driving platform for HMRC’s tax collection.” The platform covers the administration of, and accounting for, a significant number of tax regimes.
Meanwhile, EOPS is the “collection of services used to operationally support HMRC, including HR and finance.”
Both services run SAP ECC 6.0, a legacy system from the German software giant which exits mainstream support at the end of 2027. The Capgemini contract started on 28 June 2024 and is scheduled to end on 27 June 2029, well after the mainstream support deadline. Extended support is available until 2030.
Under the contract, HMRC says Capgemini will be responsible for “operation, service desk, change coordination and release services, infrastructure support, maintenance and delivering the end-to-end change lifecycle from discovery through to integrating to live services, early live support and project closure for all change orders.”
The work may be seen as a continuation of an earlier arrangement. In January 2022, Capgemini signed a £51 million ($65 million) agreement to support ETMP and EOPS Run and Associated Change Services as a sole supplier under a single lot, in a deal set to end in December 2024.
It began work to build and support ETMP under the controversial £10 billion ($12.9 billion) Aspire contract, a joint venture between Capgemini, Fujitsu, and HMRC first signed in 2004 and planned to run for 10 years.
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ETMP was one of the platforms that came under Aspire — which formally ended in 2017 after a three year extension — that HRMC planned to extend until 2020, according to the UK public spending watchdog the National Audit Office [PDF].
The Register has contacted HMRC to understand the level of competition in the most recent award, and its approach to the end of support for ECC 6.0, given there is unlikely to be time to get off the platform before support ends. The tax collector has previously denied its ETMP deal with Capgemini is an extension of the Aspire work.
In 2016, the NAO said: “The Aspire contract has provided stable but expensive IT systems. The contract has contributed to HMRC’s technology becoming out of date. HMRC is now replacing Aspire so that it can take greater control over how its IT is developed and provided.”
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