The Dutch government has many large ICT projects such as making the digital identity system DigiD more secure. For these projects, they want to plan the expected costs and time.

The government tries to calculate as accurately as possible how much ICT projects will cost and how long they will take, so that they know how much needs to be invested.

A study by the FD shows that the large government ICT projects are still being overrun. For example, the costs are on average 36% higher and the delay of these projects is on average 37%. The FD looked at 125 ICT projects with a budget of at least 5 million euros. All together, these projects originally had a budget of 2.5 billion euros, but the current budget has now risen to almost 3.5 billion euros. Of the 125 projects, 22 have already incurred costs that are at least twice as high as the original budget. But the fact that the projects are significantly overspent is not a new development, in 2014 it was estimated that an average of 1 to 5 billion euros was wasted annually on failed ICT projects. One of the current projects where the costs and time are higher than first expected is making the digital identity system DigiD more secure, this project now costs 35 million euros instead of the expected 4 million euros and is already taking almost three times as long as planned.