TORONTO — No one has been disciplined for the problematic rollout of a welfare and disability payment system that cost the public an extra $52 million to fix, Ontario’s community and social services minister said Monday.
Weeks after the Social Assistance Management System was launched in November 2014, serious defects and performance issues became public – it erroneously queued up $20 million in overpayments and $382,000 of that was actually paid out.
The ministry is also looking into an additional $35 million in potential benefit calculation errors highlighted by the auditor general in her annual report last year. The system cost about $240 million to design and implement, and the cost of fixing all of its glitches brought the total closer to $300 million.
READ MORE: ‘Nobody told me’: Helena Jaczek on new welfare payment system problems before launch
Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk found that the SAMS executive committee knew the system wasn’t functioning properly and that it hadn’t been fully tested – of the functions that were tested the failure rate was one in eight – but decided to launch it anyway.
She also found that the project team didn’t tell the executive committee about the full extent of the new system’s problems, including informing the executive about 418 serious defects, instead of the actual total of 737.
Community and Social Services Minister Helena Jaczek says she is not aware of anyone being disciplined over it, but that she has accepted responsibility.
READ MORE: Ontario on the hook for more to fix troubled support payment system
“Some problems were anticipated, just as there would be with any large introduction of a huge system like this, but clearly those issues that did arise were above and beyond what was expected,” she said.
“They felt that the problems had been overcome. That’s all I can say.”
About 10 days before SAMS’ launch date, documents obtained by The Canadian Press through a Freedom of Information request show that the minister received an email that included a memo from the team leader noting “significant challenges both with the development of the solution and with site readiness” but that the problems had been “overcome.”
READ MORE: Ontario government knew of welfare payment problems before new system launch
Jaczek is the one who should take the blame, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said.
“We think that that minister should not still be a minister,” she said. “She fumbled that ball in a very, very serious way. There was clear evidence that was told to her quite specifically that that system was not ready to go live.”
Jaczek also defended the awarding of a $32-million maintenance contract for SAMS to IBM, the company that designed the flawed system.
“It’s a routine maintenance contract,” she said Monday. “Every large IT system needs a contract like that and it was of course issued through a competitive process and the successful bidder was IBM.”
Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown said he would have thought common sense would dictate IBM shouldn’t have been eligible for that contract.
Comments