THE GOVERNMENT Department for Work and Pensions has overlooked the true cost of the ongoing farce at the Child Support Agency, the unit that presided over an IT disaster so dire that the whole kaboodle is being sent to the knackers yard.

The Department revealed some of the ongoing cost of the CSA, which it promised in 2006 to scrap, in answer to a parliamentary question put by the Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor, Vince Cable this week.

But it only told a little bit of the story.

According to the DWP numbers the CSA Operational Improvement Plan was going to come in only £3million over budget, at £110million.

The CSA numbers only included the cost of the IT, leaving out the organisational costs. Yet the cost of every other DWP IT project listed in the department's breakdown (and it listed them all) included related organisational costs.

CSA v2.0, which was started in 2000 after the CSA v1.0 went up the swanny, had cost a total of £539 million before it was condemned in 2006. Just £152 million of those costs were related to IT alone.

CSA v2.0 was such a disaster that the agency had found 600 manual workarounds. For every £1 an absent father gave the CSA in child maintenance charges, 70 pence was spent on the bodged administration. And even then there was a backlog of 330,000 children.

The Operational Improvement Plan was meant to keep things tickety boo while CSA v3.0 was designed.

V3.0, called the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, will cost £866mliion (under-budget by £4m), the department estimated. It admitted in this instance that IT costs would amount to 20 per cent of the total. It is scheduled for completion in 2015.

The total ongoing cost of the CSA and a reliable insight into whether and how the patch-up being performed by EDS, the contractor, would therefore be valuable.

It might be that this number is hard to come by. It was originally generated for a value-for money report written by the National Audit Office and might not be easily repeated. Yet the department did come up with organisational numbers for all its other projects.

The top-level specifications for the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission are still before parliament in the form of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill, which the department said it hoped would get passed before the summer recess. It was unable to comment any further on the Libdem's revelations.

Without the CSA's ongoing IT-related organisational costs, the figures showed that DWP it projects were running a total of 21 years late and £315 million over budget.

Cable said in a statement that it was an "utter shambles" and called for another review of the reasons why "ministers seem completely incapable of delivering workable IT systems on time and on budget".

And he took the opportunity to have a pop at the IT project: “Gordon Brown is living in a dream world if he thinks larger IT projects like ID cards are going to be any different.”

He might have a point there. Sensitive projects like the CSA and ID cards, in which the government uses a computer system not to run an administration, but to administer vast numbers of people, might be the most troublesome as well as the most secretive.

Last March, the Parliament's Committee for Work and Pensions asked the CSA to be more open about its IT plans so it could avoid costly cock-ups in the future. Yet the government continued to resist calls for the publication of the ID scheme's gateway reviews, which are meant to sayhow well a system is being designed and implemented.

The now doomed CSA v2.0 was implemented in complete disregard of gateway reviews and a ridiculous number of other reviews that warned about its fate, including 40 internal reviews; as well as well as £91 million on external advice - none of which were opened to public scrutiny. µ