Konrad Walser
External and internal auditors
Monitoring of positioned COBIT controls for project management
Project Resources Program Management Controlling Project Controlling
Administration ' s finance department
Administrative management( AM)
Project management
Program Management Framework Stakeholder Commitment( Project Scope Statement)( Project Risk Assessment)( Project Change Control)( Project Performance Monitoring)
Administration ' s specialist department(" Silos ")
Project Management Approach Project Phase Initiation Project Change Control
Project Management Framework Project Management Approach
Stakeholder Commitment Project Scope Statement Project Phase Initiation Integrated Project Plan
Project Risk Assessment Project Quality Plan Project Change Control Project Planning of Assurance Methods Project Performance Measurement, Reporting and Monitoring Project Closure
Project
Figure 1: IT project governance model, relationships to be analysed for administrations, organisational objects and related COBIT controls
4. Case study: Swiss federal tax administration – Insieme
Since 2001, a strategic project at the Swiss Federal Tax Administration( FTA) entitled " Insieme " has had a series of false starts. Insieme stands for: programme for innovations in the areas of IT, process and organisational systems in the Swiss Federal Tax Administration( Dijkgraaf 2007). The aim of the project was to modernise and consolidate the STOLIS and MOLIS tax administration systems of two main departments at the FTA. FTA is a department of the Federal Ministery of Finance( FMF).
4.1 Press reports on project Insieme
The project has since been stopped in September 2012( Vogt 2012). Reasons of space only allow a brief summary of the press reports. 2012, the agency director of FTA and the head official responsible for procuring IT services were dismissed: the allegations centred on corruption and nepotism(( Aebi 2012),( Balmer 2012),( Blick 2012),( Vogt 2012)). The son of the aforementioned head official is a shareholder / employee of a company that operated body leasing for the project. The prices for the body leasing were excessive. There was significant interlacing of the networks between external companies and internal employees that was difficult to penetrate( Von Burg and Stoll 2012). During the project, procurement legislation was deliberately breached numerous times. A never‐ending issue for the finance delegation is the IT systems in the federal administration: the delegation noted that they regularly had to deal with IT projects that created additional costs due to insufficient leadership structures and project organisation( Vogt 2012). Under the title“ Leading officials wanted to cover up IT problems”, Blick in 2012 used reproduced documents to argue as follows: the tax administration wanted to cover up the failure of project Insieme. This is apparent in the minutes from a meeting that was also attended by two representatives from the general secretariat of the finance minister.
In summary, the press reports suggest a serious lack of management and governance, and possible indications that there were no effective and efficient CaB mechanisms in the system in which Insieme was executed. Governance was not exercised and did not function as there was no appropriate system of CaB.
4.2 Insieme: Evidence from audits
It is astonishing that there is evidence that head officials and( parliamentary) committees from outside the Swiss Federal Tax Administration drew attention to the problematic conditions( finance delegation from the Swiss federal councils( Findel), Swiss Federal Audit Office( cf. if not otherwise stated(( EFK 2010),( EFK 2008),( EFK 2011),( EFK 2012),( Parliamentary Service of the Swiss Confederation 2012)) and criticised a revision of the relevant conditions, but did not achieve any results. Some of the important generic results from the inves‐
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