You were only supposed to blow the bloody bug off

The Italians are indulging in some self-congratulation this week, having escaped the millennium bug with only minor problems. Ernesto Bettinelli, president of the Italian government's Y2K taskforce, said the country's laid-back approach has been vindicated, gloating that they didn't put in nearly the time or money the British and Americans did, yet they survived the bug with equally low levels of disruption.

The charge now being levelled at Action 2000, the UK's official watchdog, is that it fell for an enormous hoax, a millennium bug that turned out to be nothing more than a licence for the IT industry to print money. From consultants to software houses, upwards of £20bn changed hands in an effort to correct systems in the UK alone. In Italy, the estimate is under £500m.

Gwynneth Flower, director of Action 2000, summed up the dilemma in an interview with Silicon.com in September 1998. She said: "In many ways, I'm in a no-win situation, because if we survive this millennium period successfully, everyone will say, 'Why did we waste the money on Gwynneth Flower and her team?' And if we have problems, then equally they will wish to make me the public scapegoat."

Robin Guenier, executive director of former watchdog, Taskforce 2000, has rushed to the defence of the "fix and spend" approach, preaching to everyone from Silicon.com to CNN that without the outlay of money, the result would have been disastrous.

And of course, the UK can turn all the inventories, upgrades and training into serious competitive advantage, coming into the year 2000 with a better knowledge of our IT systems than we would otherwise have had.

But it's an uncomfortable truth that countries like Italy and Russia are seeing their under-investment pay off thus far. No nuclear disasters in the Ukraine, no telecommunications black-outs in South Africa, no long queues of planes on the ground at Frankfurt Main, and the only power outages in France due to storms.

It's early days yet, but if countries like Italy emerge economically unscathed with a lesser investment in Y2K remediation, then we will be left looking like victims of hype.

However, there are signs that all will not be well for the Italians. This week, the millennium bug hit their judicial computer system and put the release dates of certain prisoners back to January 1900 - a problem that took only a few hours to correct, we are told. When business resumed on Monday, the birth and residence certificates issued in about 20 towns listed 1900 as the current year.

These are the types of problems that can snowball into something much more complex. As the Taskforce 2000 theory goes, Y2K will strike by attrition rather than a big bang, and Italy could go down by degrees.

No doubt, there are some in the UK government who are silently hoping for it to strike, if only as a vindication of our own expenditure.