Dutch government's IT projects €1 billion over budget: report

The Dutch government will spend around 1 billion euros more on IT projects than originally planned, Financieele Dagblad concludes after analyzing 125 recent ICT initiatives by the national government.

The original budget for the analyzed projects was approximately 2.5 billion euros. The expected costs have now risen to 3.5 billion euros, according to the newspaper. On average, the projects are 36 percent over budget. For 22 projects, costs doubled.

The ICT renewal at the Dutch food and consumer product safety authority NVWA is one of the projects that massively exceeded its budget. This project was canceled last year because the software was unusable. By then 100 million euros had already been spent on it. The original budget was 30 million euros. 

One reason for the increasing costs, is that many projects take longer than expected. On average, 3.5 years is planned per project, but in many cases this increased to 4.5 years. 

Financieele Dagblad got the list of projects from ICT testing office BIT, which advises the government on these projects. The list does not include the Tax Authority, which has been plagued by IT problems for years.