Accenture have denied responsibility for the failure of the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) to pay out vital subsidies to British farmers on time.
The supplier blames the problems of the RPA's wider business processes and say they delivered the system as specified.
'Our contract was to deliver a system that met a specification and to demonstrate that the system met that specification - which it did - and then help with the implementation,' Accenture director Peter Holmes told the sub-committee of the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee this week.
Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the committee last week that the system was so risk-averse that it ground to a halt. But there was not 'a single person, a single set of circumstances, one single decision which was taken which led us to where we are today,' she said.
Committee members criticised the lack of live testing of the Accenture systems.
Labour MP David Taylor said afterwards: 'I did not find their arguments very convincing. People working in the IT world particularly on large scale systems have a far greater responsibility both commercially and moral than delivery to a narrow spec.'
The overall cost of the system has risen to an estimated £54m. The original contract price was £34m, £18m of revenue cost and £16m of capital.
The agency is paying farmers 80 per cent of unchecked claims on an interim basis and former RPA chief executive Johnson McNeil has been removed from his post.
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