HMRC chief digital and information officer Mark Dearnley to leave

Civil service tech turf-wars leads to yet-another high-profile departure

Mark Dearnley, the chief digital and information officer at HMRC, is to leave the organisation next month when his three-year contract runs out.

The departure has been confirmed today by HMRC and follows the extension of the mega-outsourcing deals with Accenture and Capgemini - ones that Dearnley had been brought-in to help oversee their replacement.

In a statement, Dearnley said that he had "decided to return to the private sector after three fantastic years, to take on a new challenge".

He added: "I joined HMRC with the remit to transform its IT, create new digital services for customers and oversee the smooth transition from the £800 million a year Aspire IT contract.

"We have replaced our outdated internal IT, launched digital tax accounts for individuals and businesses, and have successfully concluded negotiations to dismantle the Aspire IT contract, taking more direct control of the design and delivery of our digital technology services at huge cost savings for HMRC.

"We have also built one of the strongest digital technology teams in the world and I am confident that they will continue to deliver HMRC's IT transformation at pace," he said.

However, getting Accenture out of HMRC's data centres before mid-2017, when its contract was up for renewal - proved to be a tougher task.

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee had expressed doubt that Dearnley would have the time to be able to prepare HMRC for the planned shift from Accenture and Capgemini to managing multiple smaller contracts with a variety of suppliers by mid-2017, in line with government policy, when their contracts were due for renewal or termination.

The announcement last week that the deals would be extended for a further three years indicated that MPs' concerns were not unfounded, and the price that the two companies were able to extract in return for the contract extensions has yet to be revealed.

Dearnley's period at HMRC had been complicated by the intensification of turf wars within the civil service over the future direction and control of IT. While the Government Digital Service (GDS) has been the focus of the tussles, outsiders such as Dearnley have also been caught in the crossfire.

Indeed, GDS co-founder Tom Loosemore, now group director of digital services at the Co-Operative, implied in a series of tweets that civil service lifers were out to 'knife' outsiders who had encroached on their turf since the coalition government established the GDS in 2010. Loosemore described it as "a day of the long digital knives".

It also follows on from the departure of Stephen Foreshew-Cain executive director at the GDS for less than nine months before he jumped ship, and comes as the GDS looks set to be the victim of a power grab by Whitehall mandarins, according to deputy leader of the Labour Party Tom Watson.