Accenture says a £182m claim from British Gas, blaming a cost blow out on a disastrous introduction of its new billing system, is ‘baseless and without merit’.

British Gas-owned Centrica was forced to write off almost £200m as a result of problems with the system, which was introduced in 2006, after which customer complaints soared, forcing the company to hire up to 2500 additional staff at one point to deal with the problems, the Financial Times reports.

Centrica, which is claiming costs back from Accenture in a write filed at the High Court last week, is expected to discuss the case at its annual general meeting today.

‘Accenture was responsible for fundamental errors in the design and implementation of the system,’ British Gas alleged in a statement yesterday. This assessment had been delivered by another consultancy hired to analyse the problem.

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