In a report issued today, the National Audit Office has concluded that government attempts to save money by sharing ‘back office’ services such as finance and human resources have actually ended up costing more money than they have saved. It appears that by creating complex services overly tailored to individual departments, the five shared services centres review by the NAO have increased costs and reduced flexibility. There has also been a failure, the report says, to develop the benchmarks necessary for measuring performance. Continue reading “The costs of sharing corporate services”