Durban - Thirteen years and R620 million later, the eThekwini Municipality’s revenue collection system is finally on the verge of going live.
But the city will need an additional R23m to get the new system up and running, city treasurer, Krish Kumar, told the city’s executive committee meeting on Tuesday – much to the DA’s consternation.
Officials, who have been under pressure to see the project get off the ground after years of delays, said on Tuesday they had been able to migrate 100% of the data from the old system to the new Revenue Management System (RMS).
Leepy Shabangu, head of Leipzig Advisory IT, a local consultancy contracted to oversee the project, said many of the issues they had experienced in migrating the data had been resolved.
“We have won the battle,” he said.
“We have struggled a lot, but we have been able to migrate 100% of the data. We have done it a few times and it was not a once-off hit,” he said.
The system, which was estimated in 2004 would cost ratepayers R90m over 18 months, has been plagued by delays and, as recently as last month, officials overseeing it had been put on notice by city manager, S’bu Sithole.
Sithole warned them that the entire project would be canned unless they sorted out the migration issues.
The system was meant to go live in July, but was delayed because only 93% of the data had been migrated.
Shabangu said this was no longer the case.
He said, from Monday, the RMS system and the old Coins revenue system would run parallel for a month so officials could iron out teething problems.
He added that if the system was able to generate bills for ratepayers without problems, it would go live in November.
“We want to make sure the system works perfectly. There are 1.5 million accounts we have to worry about and we do not want to rush it. We will run the two systems parallel to each other and fix any issues that arise. We do not want to end up with a situation where someone who has not been billed for something suddenly gets a bill for R400 000,” he said.
Kumar said the additional R23m was to extend the services of the project managers and data migration teams until the end of December.
A further R30m would come from the 2015/16 financial year adjustment budget.
Kumar stressed that the request to release the money was not from funds not budgeted for but from the past “go live” budget.
“Sufficient funds exist to cover the additional funds required, resulting in a neutral budgetary impact,” he said.
DA caucus leader, Zwakele Mncwango, was not buying it.
“Krish (Kumar) gets very technical with terms like “neutral budget” but the reality is that we have spent R620m and now he is asking for R23m more, so we will spend R643m. We seriously need to consider this project because the expenditure is just going up. What guarantees are there for skills transfer to municipal employees who will need to take over the system? Another question is how much more are we going to spend on this system?” he said.
Sithole said there was no point turning back on the system after the city had spent more than R600m.
“We have already spent the money and you cannot get it back. Do you want us to just stop it? The logical thing is to let it continue and for the parallel run to go ahead,” he said.
The executive committee agreed to the funding.
Daily News