The costs of an Oracle project soared from $25 million to about $125.5 million, leading to a government inquiry into the mess.

Computer Weekly's investigation suggests that the programme board and its manager were determined to launch the system in April 2022 "regardless of the state of the build, the level of testing undertaken and challenges faced by those working on the programme."

Notes from one manager "reveal concerns that the programme manager and steering committee could not be swayed, which meant the system went live despite having known flaws."

The magazine has viewed notes from a BCC manager pointing out several inconsistencies in the Birmingham City Council report to the cabinet published in June 2023, 14 months after the Oracle system was implemented.

The report acknowledged that some vital components of the Oracle system were not working correctly, affecting daily operations. The manager's remarks indicate that this defect in the Oracle software's deployment was known before the system became operational in April 2022.

An insider at Birmingham City Council, deeply involved in the project, informed Computer Weekly that the system was launched "despite all the warnings telling them it wouldn't work."

Since its implementation, the Oracle system has significantly disrupted the council's financial data, leaving them with a murky understanding of their financial situation.

 By January 2023, Birmingham City Council was unable to provide an accurate statement of its expenditures and budget for the upcoming financial year. The insider's comment paints a grim picture: "There's no way that we could do our year-end accounts because the system didn't work."

A June 2023 cabinet report "stated that due to problems with the council's bank reconciliation system, many transactions had to be manually assigned to accounts instead of being processed automatically by the Oracle system," the article states.

Computer Weekly has accessed a 2019 presentation showing that the council knew Oracle's standard bank reconciliation system "did not handle mixed debtor/non-debtor bank files. The proposed solution was either extensive manual intervention or a platform as a service (PaaS) from Evosys, the Oracle implementation partner hired by BCC to develop the new IT system."