Northern Ireland Social Security Agency (NISSA)

Northern Ireland Social Security Agency

The Background

The Northern Ireland Social Security Agency (NISSA) main business is to:

• Assess and pay social security benefits accurately and securely;
• Give advice and information about these benefits;
• Handle reviews and appeals;
• Prevent and detect benefit fraud, prosecute offenders and recover any benefit which has   been paid incorrectly;
• Recover benefit which has been paid in compensation cases; and
• Assess people’s financial circumstances if they are applying for legal aid.

The Agency delivers its services to the people of Northern Ireland- with a population of some 1.7 million-and the people living in 3 Districts within London through back-office services on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions.

The Problem

In October 2007 (as a result of a cost and technology review) NISSA issued an open invitation to tender for a new reconciliation software solution to handle the processing of approximately 24,000 cheques issued to benefit claiments every week.

Cheques are then presented to a bank, building society or post office and are upon payment returned to NISSA for processing. NISSA captures the encashed cheques with OCR technology and data is loaded onto GiroRec for reconciliation purposes.

The encashed cheques are then reconciled against the cheques issued enabling NISSA to settle with the Alliance and Leicester Commercial Bank.

The Requirements

The new reconciliation system was required to Match Records Retain Audit trail Provide an exception management process Have the ability to import data Multiple User Capability Be future proofed Have User

Friendly Reporting Utilise Role Based Security Capable of reconciling multi currency transactions Work in a windows 2003 environment/SQL2000 and 2005.

Further the timelines to install train and go live were reasonable but tight.

The Solution

This was a Public Tender and as such open to all companies large and small. Many expressions of interest were received and then tenders completed. There was a short leet of some 13 companies.

Meetings were held with front runners along with site visits where the project team from NISSA asked the tough questions as one would expect. In conjuction with their consultants for this exercise Delloite Touche the decision was made. AutoRek from API software.

Key reasons for the AutoRek solution included, excellent reference site visits, superior cost ratio in terms of capital spend and on going costs, feature fit and project team capabilty.

The Result

Implemtation went ahead on time and on budget. Significant ongoing cost savings to NISSA operations has resulted. Indeed the expected ROI should be within 12 months. User feedback contimues to be positive and NISSA are extremely happy with the result and are now looking to exceed their previous service levels