The National Audit Office (NAO), the parliamentary watchdog, said yesterday that it may undertake a fresh examination of the mammoth NHS IT upgrade project, on which BT is one of four main suppliers. Another supplier is the troubled software group iSoft.

The threat of further scrutiny followed the revelation in a parliamentary answer that BT has been paid just £1.3 million for about two years’ work on one £996 million contract.

Though the group insisted yesterday that this was in line with its expectation of laying down investment initially with revenues coming through later, some analysts speculated that the tiny size of the payments could reflect delivery failings by BT.

The developments will increase pressure on BT to provide further details about the project’s progress when it updates investors about its global services division — the arm that supplies telecoms and IT services to business — next month. The NHS work, worth in total more than £2 billion over ten years, is one of the biggest contracts in the division.

A spokesman for BT said: “The NAO audits the overall project, not BT. The previous report had a lot of praise for the work BT was doing.”

He said the group was very confident about its work and was “learning as it went along”.

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