Oracle's financial system implemented by stricken Birmingham City Council allocated £2 billion ($2.65 billion) in cash to the wrong financial year, leaving public sector employees to manually remove the errors.
Lessons learned from the massive Oracle Fusion ERP failure at Birmingham City Council
Europe's largest local authority has been effectively bankrupted by a combination of the self-inflicted messy ERP rollout and historic equal pay claims. In their latest report to the council's audit committee, external auditors Grant Thornton revealed that Oracle's cloud-based Fusion ERP system, which has failed to produce auditable accounts since it was implemented in 2022, continues to cause disruption to the council's financial management and operations.
The auditors have found significant risks in, for example, cash handling in recent financial years. Cash allocations posted to Oracle were recorded as a transaction on the same day.
"If the transaction it relates to is from the previous year, it means the cash entry is in the wrong year and the accounting would be incorrect. In [the financial year] 23/24 [were] £2bn of transactions. posted in the wrong year which required manual correction" , the report states.
