[TomK32]

They are profitable on the bigger scale of a national economy. Sadly no one give a damn about that these days. In Germany we have the studies Betriebswirtschaft (business) and Volkswirtschaft (national economy) and the latter is loosing vital ground in politics.

It gets worse if you look to the UK where a of lot public services are handed to companies, for example the merger of all social benefits Universal Credit is run by companies and in a manner that can only be called unprofessional and anti-social.

[pjc50]

"Universal Credit" is a horrendous scheme that manages to combine (malicious) ignorance of the needs of its beneficiaries with ignorance of how to run a large software project.

The idea sounds great on paper - there are a lot of different benefits, why not reduce duplication by merging them into one scheme then only asking for personal information once - but it ignores cashflow. People can be left without money to live on for weeks. It's also a classic "big bang" project which just piles the requirements of existing systems together, and hands them to one of the traditional government crony contractors: Accenture, HP and IBM. At least it didn't involve Serco.

[coldacid]

Sounds like the Phoenix payroll project here in Canada, except for social services. There is no way this will end well, and I wouldn't be surprised if it leads (indirectly) to the death of clients.

[TomK32]

Oh Phoenix is just a incomplete system rolled out too early. Universial Credit is pure evil. The person-gets-benefits-cut-for-having-heart-attack-at-appointment evil. The months-deceased-claimant-gets-invited-for-appointment evil. The benefit-cut-because-assessor-didn't-show-up-for-house-visit evil. The no-benefit-payouts-in-the-first-six-weeks evil.

(those are all real cases you can find in UK newspapers, mostly the Guardian)