SAP scores £275M award from UK tax collector – sans competition

The UK tax collector has awarded SAP a £275 million ($370 million) contract to move the system, which handles over £800 billion (c $1 trillion) in tax revenue and payments annually, off an aging legacy platform and onto its latest software.

Fans of competition in the public sector supply market will be disappointed to learn that the contract was awarded without a wide procurement project, and the German software giant was the only bidder.

In an official notice published earlier this month, His Majesty's Revenue & Customs announced SAP won the deal to "migrate the Enterprise Tax Management Platform (ETMP) from the legacy ECC6.0 product to its successor platform S/4HANA," which was first released in 2015.

"As a modern software product, S/4HANA will provide improvements in flexibility and cost-effective[ness] having been designed from the start to be more user-centered," the government department claims.

The contract ...