The Australian Crime Intelligence Commission has suspended the contract for its beleagured biometric identification services project in order to renegotiate it after the contractor failed to meet the deadline for completion and the cost ran $40 million over budget.
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It follows a recommendation from a scathing independent review late last year that the contract be overhauled, the project be simplified and the timeline for delivery changed.
In 2016 ACIC (then CrimTrac) contracted NEC Australia to deliver a program that would replace the national automated fingerprint identification system, adding in facial recognition, palm prints and foot prints and would be available for use by police forces around the country.
Industry news website InnovationAus reported on Wednesday that NEC contractors had been marched from ACIC's premises on Monday June 4, after being told that the project had been suspended at the start of June. It's believed the project has been suspended until Friday, while the negotiations over the contract take place.
A PriceWaterhouseCoopers report in November last year seen by Fairfax Media said "a chain of decisions involving all levels and stakeholders" had led to the project running behind schedule and over budget.
It recommended that the scope of the project be simplified and standardised, and called it "highly challenged" and presenting a "high risk" to the commission.
"There is low confidence in likelihood of delivery which requires focus to achieve turnaround."
Poor communication, operational silos, limited collaboration and a failure to estimate the project's complexity had blown it off-track, the report said.
The report also recommended that the existing fingerprint database contract with Morpho be extended for 12 months after its expiry in May 2018. It is not clear whether this contract was extended as recommended.
The report said ACIC could save $8.4 million if it removed face recognition technology from the contract. The schedule for building and deploying the facial recognition section of the project was not known at the time of the report, but other sections of the project had faced a "systemic pattern of delay".
An NEC Australia spokesman said he wasn't in a position to comment on the project, and ACIC wouldn't comment on any aspect of the identification project, as a spokeswoman said the commission "does not make any public comments on commercial matters".
NEC Australia was also the contractor for the failed Australian apprecntice management system, which was dumped by the Department of Education and Training last month due to critical defects, also found by a report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
The complexity of $20 million system was underestimated and under resourced, Senate estimates was told in May.
Know more? Email sally.whyte@fairfaxmedia.com.au or contact 0427 369 889 through Signal.
