There wasn’t anything wrong with the B.C. government’s social-welfare computer system during a series of high-profile outages this year, says the Technology Ministry.
Instead, an internal review has pointed to a government-wide “network congestion” problem that dragged down speeds and made the Integrated Case Management (ICM) computer system unusable for civil servants five months ago.
“What we learned is that network congestion within the government-wide computer network caused the ICM system to slow down,” the ministry said in a statement Thursday.
“There were firewall capacity issues, and congestion as a result of high volumes of network traffic at one of the data centres, which led to ICM running at reduced capacity.”
Despite the review, government officials admit they haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact source of the sudden traffic that overloaded its systems.
Critics raised public safety concerns in May when civil servants complained they were for several days unable to access the ICM system to process child-welfare and income-assistance cases.
The $182-million cross-ministry computer system handles case files for vulnerable clients such as children at risk and victims of domestic violence, as well as people requiring disability and welfare payments.
Government officials insist the ICM system was working properly, and what users thought were crashes were instead delays and timeouts that automatically logged them out of the system.
But the explanation did not satisfy B.C.’s representative for children and youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who has maintained a safety warning on ICM since 2012 and continues to call for an independent review into its performance problems.
“I really can’t accept that we’re talking about some sort of networking issue that just came up that was unexpected and has now been solved,” she said. “I think we’re dealing with a number of deeper concerns and I’d certainly expect some additional assurances before I could be confident.”
The ICM system remains a drag on the time of front-line social workers, she said.
The government did make improvements to its data centre and monitoring procedures to try to identify future congestion before it overwhelms its systems, the ministry said. Internal records show the government also asked several external technology companies to conduct reviews and tests in May to troubleshoot the slowdowns.
Ian Bailey, the assistant deputy minister of technology, told MLAs on the legislature’s public accounts committee this week that the costs to taxpayers for the work was “not material” because it was covered by service contracts.
The final phase of ICM’s development will roll out in November, giving it new servers and greater capacity, the ministry said.
NDP critic Michelle Mungall said regardless of how the system failed, the resulting outage put at risk the poorest citizens in the province. “People’s lives were at risk when people are living hand to mouth relying on a mere $900 a month or less to live and they can’t get that cheque,” she said.
Deputy auditor general Russ Jones told MLAs his office hopes to complete a “performance audit” of the ICM system by January or February.
