The department will hold a briefing to hear from companies what the options might be later this month. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
After spending $23m but failing to modernise the births, deaths and marriages registry, officials are having another go.
The Department of Internal Affairs has written off $22.9m on the project abandoned last year, returned an unspent $58m to the Crown and remains locked in a dispute with the Australian company DWS over the contract it terminated in late 2023.
"Although some of the work completed will be able to be used for a future civil registration system replacement project, from an accounting standards perspective, it [decided] should impair (write off) all capital costs incurred to date," DIA told RNZ.
But it needs a replacement and is setting out again, tentatively, facing "uncertainty around funding and what a long-term replacement plan would look like".
It also faced a "high risk" rating on the project, it said.
"As part of the business case process the department would need to provide assurance of how risks could be sufficiently managed or mitigated," it said.
The project to replace DIA's old unreliable tech with a new system to give people faster and more secure access to their identity data - among a total 80 million records - was central to a $150m phase of the department's $300m five-year Te Ara Manaaki project.
This month the department will hold a briefing to hear from companies what the options might be, while working on a strategic assessment to go to Cabinet.
Treasury last year imposed more checkgates that public sector projects must pass through, to try to prevent badly thought-out ones getting through.
"We are in the early stages of a discovery phase," DIA said.
This comes almost three years after it announced it was replacing its existing system and had chosen a vendor it was confident would deliver a robust system.
"The new system will be more efficient, secure, and reliable," it said in August 2022.
Some of the work done since 2022 would not be wasted, which should cut costs for a replacement, it said. This included work done on design, improving data quality, the data migration process and testing and delivery frameworks.
The department offered reassurance that the existing system "while ageing, is stable and maintenance work continues to be undertaken to ensure secure, functional and legislative compliant systems remain in place while a new long-term replacement plan is progressed".
It still had vendor support for the old system, DIA said.
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