Seven years of development, 346 million euros spent, and not a single payslip issued. That is the stark record of the ONP program, the National Payroll Operator, a project intended to revolutionize how the state manages salaries, which ended in 2014 as one of the most costly IT fiascoes in the French administration. The Cour des comptes, in its 2015 annual public report, did not mince its words: it described it as “one of the most ambitious and costly IT projects launched by the administration in the recent period,” with results deemed negligible.
Key takeaways
- Why did a “revolutionary” project launched under Sarkozy become a financial sinkhole?
- How did an annual turnover rate of 60% derail a 133-person administration?
- Who had to be warned in order to press charges over these 346 million disappeared?
An Overly Ambitious Dream Born in 2007
Everything begins under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, as part of the General Review of Public Policies. The idea looked brilliant on paper: instead of letting each ministry handle payroll for its agents with its own tools and rules, why not create a single centralized calculator capable of automating salary payments for the entire state civil service? Launched in May 2007 under Sarkozy, this “super payroll calculator” was intended to develop a single payroll information system for more than 2.4 million state employees. A new national service with delegated authority was created to carry the project, with an ambitious, concrete objective: to realize 190 million euros in yearly savings by eliminating 3,800 payroll-management positions across the ministries.
Technically, the arrangement rested on a calculator named SI-Paye, which was to be fed automatically by the HR information systems of each ministry. In practice, each branch of the state would have to connect its own HR software to this central platform, which would then compute and trigger payroll payments. Attractive in theory, this mechanism collided with a wall: the extraordinary complexity of remuneration rules in the French civil service, where each status, each body, and each premium follows its own logic. A source close to the case sums up the situation in a single stark sentence: the SI-Paye had zero practical value because none of the pilot ministries could use it under real conditions.
A Human and Technical Debacle
The numbers behind the ONP’s internal operations are dizzying and largely explain the failure. The Cour des comptes points to governance that was adrift, undermined by chronic instability at key positions. The operator’s leadership was weakened by a 25-month vacancy in the post of secretary-general and by the instability of the head of the IT department, with four changes of leadership in five years. A single figure captures the organizational chaos: the turnover rate reached a stunning 60% per year. In short, no one stayed long enough in a role to master a project of such magnitude.
This instability was compounded by a chronic shortage of skilled personnel. Eighteen positions remained vacant on an estimated staff of 133, a gaping hole for a program designed to rival the country’s largest information systems in complexity. Add to this a diluted interministerial governance where no one truly bore final responsibility, and it is easy to understand why the project stalled year after year without ever reaching the finish line. The Rue Cambon auditors summarize the root cause of the failure in a sharp phrase: “the project’s excessive ambition” combined with “deficient governance.”
346 Million Euros for Zero Payslips
The ax fell in March 2014. The Budget Minister confirmed the halt of development, just a few weeks after the abandonment of another notoriously troubled payroll software, Louvois, used by the armed forces. The final expenditure by ONP to build SI-Paye and its supporting systems surpassed all planned scenarios: while the worst-case estimates had reached 261 million euros, actual spending stood at 291 million. By including the sums spent by ministries trying to connect their own HR systems, the bill rose to 346 million euros, a figure that, ironical as it might be, is still lower than the most pessimistic projections simply because none of the ministries ever completed the system’s connection.
The Cour des comptes’ verdict is captured in a single sentence that could become a landmark in the annals of public waste: the software purchased under the ONP program was for the most part useless. Of the 346 million spent, none paid out a single salary to a civil servant. The program aimed to automate payroll for 2.7 million agents; it paid none. By comparison, this amount would have funded the construction of several colleges or covered several years of operation for a medium-sized hospital. This is what the public money essentially amounted to—spent on software that never moved beyond the drawing board.
What Remains of the Fiasco, Ten Years Later
In the wake of this failure, the state did not abandon modernizing payroll for its agents entirely. A decree issued on the same day as the 2015 report created a new service, the Interministerial Center for IT Services Related to Human Resources, tasked with revisiting the issue with a more measured approach—project by project rather than a single, sweeping reform. Yet the judicial epilogue of the affair remained as frustrating as the project itself: after three years of investigation, the Court of Budgetary and Financial Discipline could not pursue charges due to insufficient evidence against identifiable officials. In short, no one was held accountable for the 346 million euros vanished, while not a single payslip had ever been produced by the machine supposed to generate them.
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Sources: questions.assemblee-nationale.fr | lemondeinformatique.fr | snptes.fr
