New Lie tax credit feck-up

[AlfredJPruffock]

Exactly. They would NEVER be THAT stupid. Noo noo nooo. So instead they will award contracts to competent people - such as us. Won't they?

Some while back there was a study done of government IT contracts. What they found is that they are negotiated by civil servants with little or no experience of negotiating big contracts, and no experience of dealing with the slick front-men put forward by large companies such as EDS. Hence they are out of their depth, and get carried away with slick presentations and promises, and end up singing bad contracts. The company with the biggest promises wins, with insufficient clauses in the contracts to punish them if they happen to knowingly promise more than they can deliver.

But then again, I expect that I've not told you lot anything new ...

Fungus.

They didnt get away with it with the French.

CUK readers might recall that ...

On the day before the largest ever deal of its kind to be done in France with Global engineering concern ALSTOM, EDS were uncermoniously told NON after they couldnt answer some rather awkward questions about their track record.

Somehow or other, senior personell had been sent some revelaing info , apparently via an anonymous email account.

Trop dommage ,Cest la Vie, mon ami.

[zathras]

The company with the biggest promises wins, with insufficient clauses in the contracts to punish them if they happen to knowingly promise more than they can deliver.

In addition these companies are first rate negotiators and ensure that in the most part the client department is found culpable in any failure and therefore they do not pay out penalties.

That EDS paid out in this instance is a minor miracle and probably the result of the legion of failures previously.

Mind you whoever designed a system which sets the amount you pay and then works out how much it should pay you back later has got to be crazy to think that it will work. Even more so but you can still get such credits and be on above average earnings.

[IR35 Avoider]

And on top of fraud is legal manipulation of the system, partners who have a relationship, but live apart to maximise the benfits as reported in last week's DT.

Benefits should be changed to be on an individual rather than household basis. (This does present a few challenges, but I think it can be done.) The calculation would assume that anyone claiming was sharing a household with one other adult. It would be up to them to ensure this was the case.

One problem with this is that non-working spouses and adult children of millionaires could claim. A possible answer is that in my flat-tax scheme with universal tax credit the amount you could get in benefits (over and above the tax credit you get anyway) would be negligible, probably zero in most cases. Benefits/tax credit would be no-where near enough to live on for an individual, but would be just enough for two people living together to survive, since income would be doubled but "two can live as cheaply as one", and if they chose to share with more adults they would be that much better off.

I know from personal experience, when my wife-to-be moved in with me, that my household bills hardly changed. In other words the cost of living per person halved. It is ludicrous that people supposedly poor enough to live on benefits are allowed to live alone.