ACC's ProviderHub IT project missed five completion dates and underwent five resets. File photo. Photo: RNZ/Vinay Ranchhod
A botched government IT project has had to pull in contractors from around the world to carry out a costly salvage job.
ACC's ProviderHub project missed five completion dates and underwent five resets, before anyone truly raised the alarm in July.
The project began in 2018, and was designed to give thousands of doctors and other suppliers better online access to ACC services.
But it went awry from the start, with no one proving it was even needed.
The problems encompassed years of weak control, governance and accountability, and bad decisions about customising software that have cost taxpayers.
Reports now released under the OIA showed no business case was done, even though one was required, and belated checks concluded there was a financial disbenefit in building it of $1m a year.
They show the corporation trapped itself into extensive customisation of the software, resulting in "expert contractors pulled in from India and South America to assist".
Audits exposed problems, but the board and executive did not pin them down.
By May last year, it had spent $41 million, with 80 percent of that going on outside contractors.
The project was finally overhauled in August - but only after consultant Deloitte was paid to do it.
In November, a review into what went wrong was completed.
"The ProviderHub build has been reset five times between 2020 and 2024," it said.
"Board and executive governance groups received information that ProviderHub had been delayed.
"However, governance groups did not request explanations for the delays, nor seek to check that management had understood and addressed root causes."
As a result, it became a "cycle of changing personnel", while "adding delivery pressure".
"The strategic need for a provider self-service portal has been repeatedly questioned between 2018 and 2023 but has not been resolved," the review said.
ACC's existing outdated systems - which handled hundreds of thousands of queries a month - were at risk of falling over during this time. Teams scrambled to set up stopgap systems to prevent that.
ACC data deputy chief executive Michael Dreyer told RNZ they "encountered obstacles that should have been overcome in a more timely and cost-effective manner".
"We recognise that at times we didn't meet our own expectations of what a good project looks like," Dreyer said.
ACC had "a workplan in place for 2025" to improve project governance to "avoid a repeat".
A scaled-back version of ProviderHub began in a limited way last month - three years late - with a score or so suppliers linked up, which leaves another 1700 to be brought on board by June.
ACC's annual reports and reviews do not reveal the ProviderHub problems.
Its 2023 annual report instead looked forward to a time when "we will have enabled providers access to additional functionality through the ProviderHub and continued to integrate with the health system, allowing providers to interact with us through their technology of choice".
Yet the governance group members had already repeatedly debated stopping ProviderHub - which would have saved $15m - but failed to make up their minds.
The government has berated public agencies over what it called their "unrealistic" $12 billion IT wishlist, and ordered them last year to stop building customised systems and buy more IT off-the-shelf.
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