The cost of delivering IT projects in Victorian government agencies has blown out by more than $1.25 billion over the past decade, a new analysis has found.

Around 40 per cent of Victorian government IT projects have gone over their initial budget since 2016, ABC News reported on Monday.

The data, largely gathered from an online IT dashboard established by the state in 2016, reportedly shows 60 per cent of IT projects were delayed or expected to be delayed.

Budget blowouts and delays appeared to have increased, as a 2015 analysis by the Victorian Auditor-General's Office (VAGO) found almost 35 per cent of IT projects were over budget and nearly half were late.

The ABC analysis covered ICT projects which cost at least $1 million, including 1,035 completed ones and 211 ongoing works, involving 180 state government departments and agencies to the end of the 2024-25 financial year.

Ticketless myki replacement the biggest blowout

A ticketless replacement for Victoria’s myki public transport ticketing system saw the largest monetary blowout according to the ABC analysis, costing $137 million extra (or 25 per cent more) than its original budget.

A data-sharing project by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing also saw its budget revised from $7.1 million to $91.4 million, according to the analysis – a rise of almost 1,200 per cent.

The average delay to Victorian IT projects was around 10 months, but much current work was running more than 14 months overdue, the ABC found.

The IT dashboard’s latest quarter of data showed 28 projects were listed as being “off-track”, which was reportedly the most delays seen since the reporting system began.


A screenshot of Victoria's IT Dashboard, which launched in 2016. Image: Victoria's IT Dashboard

The dashboard was established after VAGO’s 2015 report found Victorian agencies and entities were “not in a position to assure parliament and the Victorian community that their ICT investments have resulted in sufficient public value to justify the significant expenditure of taxpayers' money”.

While the dashboard has since been updated to show details of the top benefits of each project, it does not include information such as contractors employed for each project.

Government accused of 'continued mismanagement'

The Victorian Department of Government Services, which manages the IT projects dashboard, did not respond by deadline to a request for comment.

The department reportedly told ABC News that individual departments and agencies oversaw their own IT projects, and many increases in costs or timeframes were not caused by projects being off track but were the result of work scaling up.

The office of Victoria’s Labor Premier Jacinta Allan also did not respond by deadline to a request for comment.

State opposition leader Jess Wilson has previously criticised Labor for what she described as “continued mismanagement of basic IT projects”, which she alleged was “draining funding away from critical health, education and community infrastructure projects”.

While it faces ballooning IT budgets, Victoria aims to become Australia’s “AI capital” according to an official mission statement released by the state government in January.