How far is this tax fiasco down to IT?

The article reports that according to Great Britain's House of Commons committee, the government has no real idea how much IT failures contributed to the tax credit debacle that saw claimants overpaid by 1.8bn pound in 2004-2005. The Treasury Committee was damning about HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC) awareness of how its computer problems contributed to the overpayment. Without this knowledge, the committee said, HMRC cannot expect to improve the running of the tax credit system. In July 2003, the government blamed computer problems for the majority of the failures during the introduction of the tax credit system that went live in April that year. However, paymaster general Dawn Primarolo, the government minister responsible for HMRC, told the Treasury Committee earlier this year that computer problems had largely been resolved.