"The only reasonable explanation is corruption." It's a reasonable explanation, but not the only one. You're taking a huge organization or organizations (UK go

"The only reasonable explanation is corruption." It's a reasonable explanation, but not the only one. You're taking a huge organization or organizations (UK government departments) that have a revolving door of top-level leadership, plus ever-evolving technology, plus another huge organization (IBM) with a huge cast of people constantly being shuffled around... Incompetence, disorganization, bad management, bouts of good management trying to re-rail things, new leadership undoing old leadership decisions... I can think of lots of reasons why government projects fail that aren't directly tied to corruption. (And just because there's corruption in a deal doesn't mean the vendor won't deliver, the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.)