No one will be held criminally responsible and taxpayers will never recover the billion dollars wasted on the Queensland Health payroll bungle.
This is the conclusion from a $5 million inquiry into the seriously flawed payroll system that started as a $6.19 million project, which will now ultimately cost taxpayers $1.2 billion.
The five-month inquiry, headed by retired Supreme Court judge Richard Chesterman, has found there's no way the state can recover its losses and makes no recommendation to refer anyone to the Department of Public Prosecutions.
Thousands of nurses were overpaid, underpaid or not paid at all when IBM rolled out its faulty system in March 2010.
The system continues to be costly and labor-intensive to operate.
Mr Chesterman found IBM should never have been awarded the contract in the first place.
He also found IBM breached its contract twice by delivering a seriously flawed system several years behind schedule.
The state had the right to terminate the contract but the Bligh government took the advice of two senior public servants and chose to settle with IBM to prevent the IT giant from walking off the job.
Premier Campbell Newman told parliament Labor grossly mismanaged every stage of the project and the only thing it did well was give IBM an iron-clad agreement that it wouldn't end the contract and relinquished all rights to take legal action.
"There is no means that the state can now seek damages for breach of contract," Mr Newman said.
The Queensland Nurses Union has questioned whether the Newman government was justified in spending so much money on an inquiry that hasn't uncovered anything new.
The union's secretary Beth Mohle says the inquiry's key findings were already covered in the Auditor-General's and KPMG reports.
"We'll still go through the report to see if it has anything new to add but we doubt that was worth $5 million", she said.
Health Minister Lawrence Springborg denied the inquiry was politically motivated.
He said it has unpicked exactly what went wrong and provides recommendations on how to avoid such a disaster in the future.
"We still have a range of people adversely named in this report who are employees of various government agencies and departments which we need to consider disciplinary action against," he added.
Mr Newman said there appeared to be collusion between IBM and the Labor government and there was unethical behaviour by IBM employees, some of whom were still employed by IBM.
"I guess it begs the question: What should the government do on behalf of the people of Queensland in dealing with IBM in the future?" he said.
"That is a matter for debate later on this week. I don't for a moment want to do business with a company that is so clearly been adversely named in all sorts of ways in this report."
