Imagine having to pay a craftsman seven times the agreed price for a house that, in the end, has only one livable room out of fifty planned. That’s roughly what the French state endured with an IT project intended to modernize the management of 1.1 million employees of the Ministry of National Education. Behind the comparatively stern acronym SIRHEN lies, in reality, one of the most striking administrative bungles of the past twenty years, a dossier where every budget line tells a story of promises not kept. A look back at a fiasco that, in this school year still marked by the usual tensions around human resources, resonates with a particularly bitter note.
- Launched in 2007 with an initial budget of 60 million euros, the SIRHEN program ultimately cost the State more than 400 million euros.
- Eleven years after its launch, the software still managed only 18,000 agents out of the million targeted, before its definitive abandonment by Jean-Michel Blanquer in July 2018.
- The Court of Auditors highlighted faulty governance and a lack of steering, forcing the ministry to reactivate its old HR systems from the 1980s after the project’s failure.
- A 400-million-euro software that never worked
- Louvois, the ill-fated forefather of a foretold fiasco
- Six years of development for two percent of agents managed
- Why no one dared to ring the alarm bell
- The hefty bill paid by French taxpayers
- An state scandal that sums up all the others
A 400-Million-Euro Software That Never Worked
The initial principle seemed almost sensible. Launched in 2007, the SIRHEN program, for the Information System and Management of Human Resources of the National Education, aimed to replace a tangle of 1980s applications with a single, modern, coherent platform. The ambition was to centrally manage the careers, pay, and training of all ministry personnel. On paper, a budget of €60 million should have sufficed to complete this project. In practice, the final bill exceeded €400 million, about six and a half times the originally planned amount, for a tool that never truly fulfilled its mission.
Louvois, the Ill-Fated Forefather of an Announced Fiasco
This kind of derailment is, unfortunately, not new in the French administration. Two years before SIRHEN’s shutdown, another software had already made headlines: Louvois, then nicknamed the crazy payroll software for the armed forces. This system, intended to automatically compute military salaries, ended up disbursing wildly erroneous amounts to around 160,000 soldiers, with some receiving absurd sums and others seeing no pay at all. The fiasco cost €157 million before being permanently abandoned. These two cases, distinct yet strikingly similar, sketch the portrait of an administration unable to carry major digital projects through to completion, due to a lack of foresight and disciplined management.
Six Years of Development for Two Percent of Agents Managed
The timeline of SIRHEN alone measures the scale of the problem. It took until December 2014, seven years after the official launch, to see the first transfer of personnel to the new tool. And even then, this transfer involved only about 4,000 agents from the academic inspectorates, a drop in the ocean compared with the targeted workforce. Eleven years after the program began, the software still managed to handle merely 18,000 agents, barely 2% of the one million agents SIRHEN was originally supposed to manage. In light of this failure, the minister Jean-Michel Blanquer ultimately ordered the program’s definitive termination in July 2018, deeming the tool wholly unsuitable for the challenges of human resources management as well as for the demands of modern technology.
Why No One Dared to Ring the Alarm Bell
How could such a project languish for more than a decade without anyone stepping in earlier? The Court of Auditors provided telling explanations in its February 2020 annual report. The institution pointed to an almost invisible governance, in other words, a near-total lack of clear project leadership, as well as external contractors largely outside the administration’s control. In such a setup, each actor deflects responsibility, warnings get lost in the layers of hierarchy, and the project keeps moving forward by budgetary inertia, funded year after year by new credits meant to finally unlock it.
The Steep Bill Paid by French Taxpayers
In September 2019, the Court of Auditors confirmed that total expenditures related to the program clearly exceeded €400 million, a figure inflated in particular by the maintenance costs of a tool that, clumsily yet still, continued to manage the 18,000 already transferred employees. After the project’s official termination, the ministry found itself compelled to reactivate its old HR management systems from the 1980s, the very aging tools SIRHEN was supposed to replace. A costly and symbolically embarrassing step backward, illustrating how public money was poured into a solution without offering a credible fallback.
An State Scandal That Sums Up All the Others
Beyond the numbers, the Court of Auditors also noted, once SIRHEN was halted, a lack of a credible alternative and only rough funding for the ministry’s HR dossier. It even described the operation of the old information systems as the most critical risk for the ministry since the program’s end. In short, hundreds of millions of euros were spent to no avail, and the administration now has to manage the careers and payrolls of more than a million employees with obsolete tools, without a clear safety net for the future.
From Louvois to SIRHEN, these two episodes outline the same pattern: noble technological ambitions, initial budgets that were far too modest, and governance that failed to right the course in time. A question persists that extends well beyond the Education sector: how many other state digital projects are currently advancing, quietly, on this same slippery slope?
