motortax.ie

Seth Brundle

I heard recently when it was reported that a load of government websites weren't delivered, etc. that motortax.ie cost €2.5 million. Other websites cost as much if not more.
How?
In fairness, motortax.ie validates (with some warnings) but there is nothing to it that I can see to justify this cost. Am I missing something?

mike65

2.5 million for a simple data base and cc integration?

Mike.

louie

That could be just rumours...
The website is not worth that much.

Seth Brundle

I can't find a link but it was mentioned on the radio recently (Jan 7th or 8th)

jhegarty

Something gives me the felling its €2.4m on consultants and €.1m on development

Kimbot

kbannon, I think you are right about the cost.

And another good one is that most government websites are not owned by the government from what I heard but that was mainly in connection to ROS.

Seth Brundle

jhegarty wrote: »

Something gives me the felling its €2.4m on consultants and €.1m on development

IMO even €.1m is too much for this site!

Bob the Builder

kbannon wrote: »

IMO even €.1m is too much for this site!

I'd say €1000 would have designed the website perfecto! Overfeckingpaid consultants and what not....

misterq

There are some quite naive comments on this thread about what is involved in delivering motor taxation services online.

Yes, well done, you could possibly design a site of a similar standard than what is on motortax.ie for a couple of thousand at most, but could you:

- integrate with existing motor tax systems
- integrate online payments
- setup fulfillment processes such as posting of receipts, tax discs etc
- provide backup, disaster recovery and and failover systems

All for that price?
I'm not 100% sure, but as I understand it, motor tax offices are administered through local government, so there is possibly some more systems integration involved here.

So when you say motortax.ie cost €2.5 million, yes it probably did, but not for just the design of the site.

As for someone saying "most government websites are not owned by the government" eh, yeah. Maybe he is technically correct, the websites are owned by the relevant state bodies, not "the government".

But for someone to think that ROS, the Revenue Online Service where tax returns are made, is not under government ownership, well sorry, but as I said at the top of my post, that is very naive.

Laslo

misterq wrote: »

There are some quite naive comments on this thread

+1

Kimbot

misterq wrote: »

There are some quite naive comments on this thread about what is involved in delivering motor taxation services online.

Yes, well done, you could possibly design a site of a similar standard than what is on motortax.ie for a couple of thousand at most, but could you:

- integrate with existing motor tax systems
- integrate online payments
- setup fulfillment processes such as posting of receipts, tax discs etc
- provide backup, disaster recovery and and failover systems

All for that price?
I'm not 100% sure, but as I understand it, motor tax offices are administered through local government, so there is possibly some more systems integration involved here.

So when you say motortax.ie cost €2.5 million, yes it probably did, but not for just the design of the site.

As for someone saying "most government websites are not owned by the government" eh, yeah. Maybe he is technically correct, the websites are owned by the relevant state bodies, not "the government".

But for someone to think that ROS, the Revenue Online Service where tax returns are made, is not under government ownership, well sorry, but as I said at the top of my post, that is very naive.

ROS was designed and maintained by consultants and from what I was told when I worked on the site in Revenue, the consultancy company own the rights and the website.

tvr

you know what they say no one ever got fired for bringing in accenture. Regardless no one gets fired in the civil service buts its just easier to justify a project by spenting 2 million on it because thats what the consultant said it would cost.

Evil Phil

tvr wrote: »

you know what they say no one ever got fired for bringing in accenture. Regardless no one gets fired in the civil service buts its just easier to justify a project by spenting 2 million on it because thats what the consultant said it would cost.

Thats another naive statement.

http://www.motortax.ie/ is just the interface that we use to renew our motor tax. As misterq has already pointed out there's a lot more to automating the motor tax system than the few webpages we have access to. Its what's going on under the bonnet that costs that amount of money. There is a huge amount of integration involved in a site like motortax.ie, 2.5 mil sounds like a very fair price to me.

CuLT

Yeah sorry guys €2.5mil could very well be a realistic figure. The integration and backend systems are probably reasonably sophisticated, and mainenance contracts etc can put the bill up quite high.

You have to think about it in terms of what it is saving the Rev to have people register their own motor tax online. You're freeing up people in head office, reducing the amount of paperwork. Implementing such a system has massive financial benefits when it's used for something like this.

I used to work for an international telco, and one of the systems I was working on an aspect of was a CRM system that cost the company about €2mil per annum in licensing and support. Frontend was a bag of spanners (which I was charged with fixing) but the backend system and economic saving made it all quite justified.

Edit: It's not quite throwing up a LAMP server and installing phpbb. Not to be rude, but if you think it would cost a grand to create a system to integrate with the national motor taxation system you've absolutely no idea what you're talking about.