Europe's biggest local authority is facing a $15.58m (£12m) bill for manual audits of accounts that should have been supported by an Oracle ERP system installed in April 2022.
Lessons learned from the massive Oracle Fusion ERP failure at Birmingham City Council
The £3.2 billion ($4.1 billion) budget authority has become infamous for its ERP project disaster, which has seen it switch from legacy SAP software to cloud-based Oracle Fusion, co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison once flaunted to investors .
The delayed project left the council without auditable accounts and without security features, along with costs climbing from around £20m to as much as £131m. The IT problems contributed to Birmingham City Council becoming effectively bankrupt last September.
A report by external auditors stated that the council will not have a fully operational cash system until April next year, three years after it went live on an Oracle ERP, and will have to wait until September 2025 for a fully operational financial system.
