CIS warning goes out to large construction firms

A quarter of all larger construction companies – those with their own in-house software developers – are in for a big shock when the new electronic version of the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) goes live in April 2007.

A government survey shows that around 25% of big players anticipate being able to configure their IT systems themselves. But Dennis Keeling, chief executive of BASDA (British Application Software Developers Association), warned: “We think they’re going to find this a major problem. “The encapsulation of the IR mark, which proves that there has been no tampering in transit, is difficult. “All BASDA-member firms have done it, no problem, but in those construction companies that own their own IT they won’t know where to start.”

Jim Etherton, senior product manager at software specialist Coins, agreed. “The new difficult element in CIS is going to be the IR mark,” he said. “With standard XML [a technical format for exchanging documents over the Internet] there’s nothing to prove that data hasn’t been tampered with by the time it arrives at the far end.

“The IR mark wasn’t introduced for payroll submissions in either of the last two years. It does a total hash calculation and includes the result in the XML file.

“The Revenue does the same calculation on the file contents to check that it gets the same result.”

Etherton added to Keeling’s warning to companies using in-house software.

• For more, see CIS feature on pages 22-23.

[Contract Journal, 27 September 2006, p 2]