The UK Cabinet Office has scrapped a recruitment platform, recording a £7.8 million loss, while disclosing a potential penalty of up to £8.9 million over its handling of contractors' tax status. The department's annual report for 2025-26 said the Civil Service Jobs Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Programme, a central government plan for a unified, cross-departmental hiring system, was being closed to "align with the Shared Services for Government Strategy," which the Prime Minister's department also manages. The report said axing the program resulted in a "constructive loss" of £7.8 million. In March, a report from the National Audit Office said the ATS was an example of an interdependency that has not been effectively managed in the Shared Services Strategy, which is designed to bring Whitehall departments onto a common set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise applications. The Cabinet Office's annual report says closure will allow a new project better aligned with that strategy. "The program consistently identified lack of adoption from shared services clusters as a risk. At various points between 2023 and 2025, some shared services clusters raised concerns about the ATS program and stated that they would prefer to use the ATS functionality of their own ERPs over the new central platform. Despite this, Cabinet Office did not assess the need for a reset as soon as it could have, which made it challenging to assess alternative options for delivering an ATS. The ATS program was reset in October 2025," the report said. At the time, the Cabinet Office estimated that the total costs of the program reset would be £26 million to £38 million. The annual report estimates the Cabinet Office's liability for unpaid tax and National Insurance under IR35 off-payroll working rules, including interest, at £38.5 million. The rules affect many tech contractors working through their own companies. It paid £15 million toward settlement in February 2026, leaving a £23.5 million provision at year-end. The final settlement remains under negotiation. The department also disclosed potential HMRC penalties of up to £8.9 million, but considers payment unlikely because penalties can be suspended subject to compliance conditions. The report said: "The department has identified a remote contingent liability regarding potential financial penalties from HMRC relating to historic off-payroll working (IR35) compliance. In October 2025, HMRC concluded that the department's historic processes were inadequate and reasonable care was not taken, which can attract a penalty of 15 percent to 30 percent against the net tax liability before interest." Dave Chaplin, CEO of IR35 tax compliance firm IR35 Shield, said the HMRC assessment raises serious questions about compliance at the very heart of government. "The lesson for every organization engaging contractors is that claiming to take reasonable care is not the same as being able to demonstrate it. IR35 determinations must be supported by robust processes, accurate information, and evidence that the rules have been applied properly. Getting it wrong can have consequences far beyond the original tax bill," Chaplin said. ®

The Home Office's latest attempt to speed up asylum decisions with AI has hit an awkward snag: a new report says more than one in five interview summaries checked by experts failed accuracy tests. A 20-page investigation by the Open Rights Group (ORG) claims the department is pressing ahead with AI tools despite concerns about their accuracy, oversight, and promised efficiency gains. The findings, based on Freedom of Information requests and correspondence with ministers, concern two systems used by Home Office caseworkers: Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS), which summarizes asylum interviews, and Asylum Policy Search (APS), a chat-style tool helping officials search country policy information. Both use OpenAI's GPT-4o model through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry. The government insists humans remain responsible for asylum decisions, but ORG questions how reliably caseworkers can spot mistakes in AI-generated information. Figures obtained by the campaign group show that 45 of 203 AI-generated interview summaries failed initial expert checks after the system was rolled out in April 2026. That's a 22 percent failure rate, compared with the 9 percent rejection rate recorded during the original pilot. Another 19 summaries were flagged for further review. The figures also record 56 second-stage reviews, of which 30 failed to meet the required standard. The errors can include factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations of what asylum seekers said during interviews. ORG also found that summaries could pass the checks even if they omitted important details, as long as the information they did include was accurate. Despite those results, relatively few summaries have been examined. ORG estimates that Home Office experts checked only 0.3 percent between April and July, based on the department's projected monthly caseload of 17,515. ORG also questioned whether the tools were saving much time. It says the average monthly number of initial substantive asylum decisions since April 2026 fell about 42 percent compared with the same period in 2025, while the mean time from interview to decision rose 29 percent. While those figures don't prove that AI caused the slowdown, they offer little evidence of the productivity gains ministers have promised. Oversight of the separate Asylum Policy Search tool also appears lacking. The Home Office confirmed in August that expert testing had stopped, despite previously telling MPs that checks were continuing. ORG says no summary of the testing results was produced. Meanwhile, asylum applicants are not specifically told when AI has been used in their cases and cannot inspect or correct the summaries generated from their interviews. ORG also questions the Home Office's claims of human oversight. The department's own data protection assessment says ACS automates work previously done by technical specialists, who reviewed and summarized asylum cases before passing them to decision-makers. ORG warns the tool could remove an experienced layer of scrutiny, rather than simply save staff time. The group is calling for both tools to be suspended and independently audited, arguing that the current safeguards are inadequate for decisions that determine whether someone can remain in the UK. It's not the first time the Home Office's technology plans have come under fire. In June, more than 60 rights groups urged ministers to abandon plans for AI-powered age estimation of asylum-seeking children, warning that the technology was unreliable around the crucial 16-to-18-year-old age range. Later that month, an inspection found that the department's long-delayed Atlas immigration system was failing to provide caseworkers with feedback from asylum appeals, forcing staff to rely on workarounds. The Home Office did not respond to The Register's questions. ®