Financial troubles at IT giant could impact many Dutch government agencies

The French IT company Atos is in financial trouble and an intervention by the French government seems necessary to prevent bankruptcy. A collapse will impact multiple Dutch government institutions, including the Ministry of Defense and the Social Insurance Bank (SVB), NRC reports.

The SVB has outsourced the implementation of massive processes to Atos, including the payment of state pensions and child benefits. The French IT giant also manages the medical data of over 350,000 Netherlands residents who receive long-term care through the CIZ (Centrum Indicatiestelling Zorg). Both government agencies told NRC that they are “in close contact with Atos” and taking “appropriate measures” to ensure continuity of service.

The Ministry of Defense is “closely monitoring the situation surrounding Atos,” a spokesperson told the newspaper. “Different scenarios are taken into account. Defense prepares for possible outcomes by working - with other market parties - on alternatives.”

BIJ12, the implementing organization of the 12 Dutch provinces, has also taken “several measures to safeguard the continuity of services to, and data from, the provinces,” a spokesperson told NRC. Atos manages the provinces’ application landscapes, storing data about company sites, groundwater, and protected animal species, among other things.

Concerns about Dutch government institutions’ dependency on external suppliers for their IT facilities are not new. A parliamentary committee urged the government to get more control over its IT in 2014. Experts said the same thing two years later in a report commissioned by Minister Stef Blok. More recently, experts raised concerns about the Dutch government and critical companies using American cloud services for their email services.