Birmingham City Councils Oracle system woes have continued into 2025, with concerns being raised in Mondays meeting of the council to set the annual budget, highlighting accounting problems. These cannot be fixed until reimplementation of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is operational.One councillor said: When you look into the budget book, you find that there is a deficit in the budget of 380m over the next three years, but what really concerns me is the effect of Oracle and that we have a deficit of 141m of uncollected business rates that is equivalent to a 30% increase in council tax.During the latest Birmingham audit committee meeting, which took place the following day, on 5 March, councillors raised serious questions over why the decision to go live with the Oracle system was taken, despite many areas of the project being incomplete.There was an optimism bias, said Grant Thornton auditor, Mark Stocks.Reflecting the findings of the Grant Thornton value-for-money report in relation to the implementation of the ERP system, which was published at the end of February, Stocks, who led the team of two external auditors present, said: Nobody took ownership.Stocks went on to describe how the council had lost corporate knowledge of the reimplementation of the Oracle ERP system after its finance officer Fiona Greenway left. Significantly, the suppliers all told the council to go live.The information was there to stop this, but all the suppliers said go live. The system wasnt ready when it went live, he added.As Computer Weekly previously reported, since the implementation of an Oracle ERP system to replace SAP in April 2022, the council has faced significant issues with the processes and interfaces, as well as the systems ability to produce reports.Rather than adapting its internal business processes to align with the way the new system worked, Birmingham embarked on an ERP programme involving adapting the Oracle system, which resulted in an incomplete implementation at the time the system was meant to go live.Regarding the decision to proceed with going live with Oracle, the auditor said that council officers did not have a thorough understanding of the risks they were taking. The advice from the suppliers was caveated and these caveats, according to the auditor, should have been looked at. The areas of concern included the bank reconciliation system (BRS) and general ledger in testing.Theres correspondence from officers saying they were struggling with the BRS system, the accounts receivable and some aspects of the general ledger were reported as untestable. Concerns were expressed over past customisations; accounts payable and accounts receivable customisations were not switched on and the programme was still receiving change requests, he said.Commenting on the Grant Thornton report, councillor Richard Parkins said: This report is probably the worst one Ive seen. Of all the reports across my desk, this really is a case study in how not to implement an IT system. The go-live decision is an astonishing one when you look at where we were and how many people sat around the table.When questioned on whether the system had been adequately tested before the go-live date, auditor Thomas Foster from Grant Thornton, said: Testing was completed in many areas. Payroll had been highlighted as a key area, but the problem was that the testing wasnt complete and there were key areas that hadnt been tested and they, perhaps, were lower down the list of risk highlighted items and therefore didnt get the focus that they deserved at that time.The commissioners review of the audit committee report published on 5 March stated that the council is running a business change programme underpinned by technology, which requires people to be trained and upskilled in how to use the new ERP software.The council must not deviate from adopting the best practice processes offered by the software, it must focus on completing the system design and obtaining full executive commitment, the review document stated.The commissioners also said they remain concerned about the inherited quality of data that was loaded into the 2022 implementation and the current poor-quality data held in the current system.Even if the council delivers a well-designed system and equips users with the training required to use it, if the quality of the data migrated to the new system is of poor quality (missing, inaccurate, duplicated), the system will again fail to operate and deliver the benefits the council needs, the commissioners warn in the review document. They urged the council to address data quality ahead of the implementation.At the previous audit committee meeting on 29 January, councillor Paul Tilsey asked if the culture of the council is changing around areas such as the ERP project: Do you think that there are adequate independent ways of reporting on progress of these to make sure that we are on track?The need to change the culture at the council is among the key recommendations Grant Thornton highlighted in its report.Stocks, who was the auditor at the 29 January meeting, acknowledged Tilseys concerns that the ERP may not be fixed in a short time. The earliest I think is April 26, he said. Until I see everything aligned, I am worried. Until you have an operating financial system, this is always going to be difficult.Read more stories about the Birmingham City Council ERP projectBirmingham City Councils Oracle implementation explained What went wrong: The council swapped out a heavily customised SAP ERP system for Oracle Cloud, but since it went live, it has had numerous technical challenges.Birmingham looks into reimplementing troubled Oracle ERP: City council audit committee meeting shows Birmingham City Council plans to follow Oracle best practices.