Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) on Thursday handed down its examination of the Services Australia Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT) program, finding the agency had "largely appropriate arrangements" in many areas, but was lacking on the cyber and cost monitoring fronts.
Kicked off[1] in 2015, WPIT was originally slated to cost around AU$1.5 billion and run from 2015 to 2022, with one of the core reasons for the program being to replace the then-30-year-old Income Security Integrated System (ISIS).
"In June 2020, the decommissioning of this key element of the system was confirmed to be the main goal of the welfare payment system redeployment," ANAO wrote.
"However, almost half of the decommissioning was not expected to be completed by the end of the program."
Internal reports at the agency detailed that the decommissioning of ISIS was "not achievable within the funding envelope or timeframe", and a process to determine if this was possible would not be started until a replacement was commissioned, ANAO said in its report.
Services Australia told ANAO that 13% of ISIS functionality had transitioned to its SAP CRM instance[2] while a further 39% would be transitioned by the end of June 2020, leaving almost half its functionality in place.
"Delays to replacement and decommissioning have put at risk the ability to deliver on the original objectives of the WPIT Programme, and delay or negate realisation of all the expected benefits of the welfare payment system redevelopment," ANAO wrote.
The agency also had issues in documenting the functionality of the system, telling the audit office that functionality was in the system's programming.
"Services Australia advised the ANAO that while it had recorded functionality in source code, there were historical gaps in