or challenge to Atos given the vulnerability of many of its clients, the size of the contract and its role as a near monopoly supplier. We are concerned that the profitability of the contract may be disproportionate to the limited risks which the contractor bears" and concluded: "The Department's got to get a grip of this contract!". The Office for Budget Responsibility found that between 2011 and 2014, no savings at all had been made in the sickness benefit budget, which remained at more than £13 billion a year. Furthermore, because many more claimants than forecast were being placed in the Support Group, the government's fiscal watchdog raised its estimate for spending on ESA from 2014 by one billion pounds a year. Criticism of Maximus Failure to meet volume targets Within six months of taking over the contract, the DWP expected Maximus to have the capacity to carry out one million assessments a year. This was intended to clear the backlog and then allow the department to order hundreds of thousands of reassessments of people who had already been granted ESA, in the belief that many would have recovered from their illness and so could be taken off benefits. Repeated assessments were one of four key tenets of ESA from the very beginning, but the programme had to be put on hold in early 2014. At the end of October 2015, the DWP's director-general of finance was bullish about hitting this higher target when he appeared before a parliamentary committee, saying: "We are confident that [Maximus] will over-achieve the amounts of work over and above the forecast that was set". But at the start of November, Maximus's senior management team warned its shareholders that certain performance metrics, most notably volume targets, were not being met and the challenges with the WCA contract resulted in reduced earnings outlook for fiscal year 2016. For fiscal year 2015, the contract had generated at least 35 million dollars less than expected. The company additionally stated that although recruitment of healthcare professionals had improved, their training and retention was still a problem, with a shortfall of assessors expected to last until the autumn of 2016. On the same day, the price of shares in the company fell sharply, losing more than 20% of their value. High cost of Maximus contract In January 2016, the National Audit Office (NAO) published its evaluation of the DWP's health