Councils are being charged an excessive markup on IT products as suppliers use the confusion caused by Brexit to increase their prices, a new study has revealed.
The annual IT Margins Benchmarking Study, published by KnowledgeBus, found the average margin paid by councils was 16%. Best practice states markup should be no more than 3%.
In one case, a local council was charged a margin of 856%.
Al Nagar, head of benchmarking at KnowledgeBus, said: 'Although there was a period of rapid inflation in the tech market not all prices increased. Some product prices stayed the same and some went down. But what we witnessed was unscrupulous suppliers taking advantage of the perception that price increases were going up across the board.
'Many organisations – without the tools to check what was really happening in the market – were caught out by these actions.'
