$70 Million Budget Breaker

This had to hurt; I read recently that the 2007 budget for the BBC website had gone £36 million over budget (that’s around $70 million). The report sighted “a cocktail of oversight and budget mismanagement” that lead to the budget overspill.

About two-thirds of the £36m breach was down to “misallocation of general overheads and costs” – accountants had failed to include costs such as the buildings that house its digital teams. Then, there was the £3.5m in unauthorized overspend and a further £7.4m in overspending.

BBC.co.uk is one of the UK’s leading online media destinations and by the end of last year, according to Nielson, the website had an average of 16.5 million users a month, almost half of the total 33 million internet users in the UK.