£37M SAP overhaul could extend Capgemini's run with UK tax collector to 28 years

The UK's tax collector has awarded Capgemini a £37 million contract to help migrate a critical tax system from SAP's legacy ECC platform to S/4HANA, extending a supplier relationship that began in 2004.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has hired the French IT services company to move the Enterprise Tax Management Platform (ETMP) from SAP ECC 6.0 to its successor, S/4HANA, a completely re-engineered application platform.

The system provides 40,000 users with returns processing, tax accounting, payments, and data management capabilities, and handles more than £800 billion in tax revenue and payments annually.

The contract runs until 2032, potentially extending Capgemini's involvement with HMRC's tax systems to 28 years.

Capgemini became HMRC's lead technology supplier in 2004 under the Aspire contract, with Fujitsu and Accenture serving as subcontractors.

In 2014, the National Audit Office (NAO) said HMRC was set to spend £10.4 billion on the contract, compared to the £4.1 billion estimate used to evaluate Capgemini's bid.

In 2022, Capgemini won a £51 million, three-year contract to provide run and change services for ETMP and Enterprise Operations (EOPS).

In 2024, the French supplier again won the contract to provide run and change services for ETMP and EOPS.

The five-year agreement, which runs until June 2029, is valued at between £403 million and £574 million.

HMRC has previously denied that its later ETMP contracts with Capgemini were extensions of Aspire, which formally ended in 2017, although some services continued until 2020.

Separately, Capgemini won a Contact Centre as a Service contract worth up to £600 million over ten years.

The Register understands there were several bidders for the new ETMP migration deal, but HMRC officials argued the details were commercially sensitive.

They said HMRC took steps to ensure a fair and transparent procurement and a level playing field for all bidders.

The competitors came from Lot 3 of the Digital & Legacy Application Services (DALAS) framework, which lists Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, CGI, Cognizant, and IBM as suppliers.