Government’s tax department has inked a contract of up to four years with tech giant IBM which, over the coming months, will enable civil servants to obtain remote system access

HM Revenue and Customs has signed a multimillion-pound deal to enable staff to gain remote access to the department’s systems.

On 11 September, the department entered into a three-year engagement with long-standing tech partner IBM, a newly published commercial notice indicates. The deal – which can be extended for a further 12 months, at HMRC’s discretion – is valued at about £12.1m, inclusive of VAT.

For that price, the tech giant is contracted to fulfil the tax department’s requirement for “a virtualised desktop hosted platform to enable remote access to the HMRC environment for a range of user cases”.

The deal was awarded as a call-off via the G-Cloud 14 framework, with price being the primary determining factor for HMRC’s ultimate choice of provider. However, the contract-award notice also indicates that IBM was the only firm to bid for the contract.

HMRC’s virtual desktop service is referred to as vStride. Online archives of government spend-control data indicates that the department was approved to spend £3.7m on a deal supporting provision of the service in August 2023, although no supplier information for this deal is available.