Unpaid software bill cut off parliament expense system in January

A 15-hour outage of parliamentarians’ expense system in January has been attributed to an unpaid invoice.

The cause of the January 23 outage of the Parliamentary Expense Management System (PEMS) between 5am and 8pm emerged last Tuesday evening in a hearing of the Senate Public Finance and Administration Committee.

The Department of Finance’s first assistant secretary for business enabling services Tracey Carroll revealed the issue in response to questions from Liberal senator Jane Hume.

The software in question is the two-factor authentication system PEMS uses.

“It was the result of an administrative issue between the department and the company that manages our two-factor authentication,” Carroll told the committee.

“As the issue was identified, we were working with that company, and efforts were made during that time to have the 2FA re-established," she continued.

Under further questioning, Carroll told Hume an unpaid invoice was the cause: the 2FA software the department uses for PEMS is billed in advance rather than in arrears, so when it wasn’t paid, the unnamed provider cut off access to the software.

Carroll told the committee there had been a change in the provider’s billing arrangements, which contributed to the outage.

“We had identified there was a billing issue, that we hadn’t been charged appropriately,” she said, which was being “worked through” when access to the 2FA software was cut off.

The billing arrangement has now been changed: “We’ve got arrangements in place so that we are billed in arrears in future," Carroll said.