RTÉ confirms €3.6 million write-down on partly failed IT system

RTÉ HAS CONFIRMED that it was forced to write-down €3.6 million on a partly failed IT system.

Details of the write-down were published this evening by The Currency and later confirmed by RTÉ.

The IT system, which had been intended to replace its finance and HR systems, was funded from the proceeds of the sale of around nine acres of land at its Donnybrook campus.

In a statement this evening, RTÉ said the “purpose of the IT system was to replace five legacy systems that were used for Finance and HR which were at or near end of life”.

One of them had been installed in 2001, while another two were installed in 2003.

The Currency reported that details of the write-down were relayed to the Department of  Arts and Media last month.

This was in response to a request sent to all agencies under the Department’s remit to provide details of capital projects which cost more than €500,000 and were either abandoned or materially failed to deliver.

RTÉ said that the contract for the new IT system followed an “extensive public procurement process in 2018” and that two suppliers were appointed to the project.

It added that it chose the tender which was the cheapest proposal and that “it was considered that this proposal would be the most economically advantageous to RTÉ”.

However, RTÉ said that “issues arose almost immediately” and that by January 2019, the project was already behind schedule.

RTÉ pointed to “resource constraints” within the public broadcaster and added that the “build quality of the product in testing did not meet expectations and over-ambitious timelines”.

RTÉ added that this was all “compounded with the outbreak of Covid-19”.

The contract was terminated but restarted in August 2022.

In March 2023, the new finance system went live but the HR elements were not delivered.

RTÉ said that the “majority of the impairment relates to the effort to deliver the HR part of the project, amounting to €2.3m”.

It added: “The remaining €1.3m related to the delay and effort in delivering the finance element of the project.”

The broadcaster added that this “impairment is very much an exception in the context of extensive projects delivered annually by RTÉ”.

RTÉ also remarked that “corporate governance reforms introduced over the past 18 months are designed to mitigate against the risk of recurrence of such issues”.

A Department spokesperson told The Currency that Minister P atrick O’Donovan met with the RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst on 8 April to discuss “the background to the project and the reasons for the failure to deliver on the original scope of the project”.