UK Home Office seeks suppliers: £25m up for grabs to build database to keep track of crimelords' ill-gotten gains
- Reference: 1599485054
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/07/home_office_seeks_suppliers_to/
- Source link:
In a procurement which could be worth £25m, the central government ministry is looking to replace the Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD), a live operational system managed by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
According to [1]government figures from July 2018, the total debt from criminal confiscation orders amounted to just under £2bn, of which £152m is considered "recoverable". Part of JARD’s job is to keep track of the recovery of assets through these orders.
Database entries come from law enforcement and prosecution agencies, including the Police, Crown Prosecution Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, Serious Fraud Office and Local Authorities.
The database, which also records the recovery of assets in tax cases, dates back to 2004, is monitored by the Home Office, and managed by the National Crime Agency. The Home Office has not so far responded to The Register ’s questions about which vendor built the system.
But after around 15 years, it is sorely in need of renewal.
According to a [2]Prior Information Notice for early engagement with the IT market, “JARD is an ageing system that has been modified and updated on a number of occasions over its 15-year plus lifecycle. It is now, however, reaching the end of its useful life as it is not conducive to modern expectations of electronic data capture and subsequent analytical filtering and manipulation.”
The new procurement is not the first effort to improve the system’s performance: The government’s [3]response to a Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee report from 2016 said that from April 2014 to March 2016, the Home Office invested £2.74m in the JARD system, “including through a three-year improvement plan to ensure that it can provide a modern platform for current and future enhancements and also improving the data quality across agencies.”
Joint work by HM Courts and Tribunal Service, with the support of the National Crime Agency, cleansed 5,000 records, improving the accuracy of the information available to operational agencies and reducing the notional value of outstanding confiscation orders by £13m, the government said.
“The improvement plan delivered immediate technical improvements to JARD by June 2015, and further work to complete the enhancements to the confiscation orders section of JARD will continue until the end of 2017,” it said.
Presumably the improvements were so significant and the platform so “modern” that it would need to scrapped entirely three years after the programme ended.
Fancy a try? In its tender notice, the Home Office said suppliers must express their interest by 25 September 2020. Suppliers are expected to say how “they would approach implementation and validation of potential costs for build, operate and maintain such a system for a five year period,” it said.
The Home Office expects to issue a call for competition in 2021. ®
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[1] https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2018-10-12/178465
[2] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:419266-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0
[3] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/805/80504.htm
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I can do that!
I'll do it for £24,500,150.00
A few hours in Access, cost £150
Donation to Johnson's Child Support Fund: £500,000
Profit: £24 million
Cayman Islands for me.
Re: I can do that!
Whoa there. Access? I think two worksheets in Excel will suffice.
Re: I can do that!
Remember to ensure the only copy of the "database" is on a thumb drive that is easily "lost" when the evil crime lords offer you sufficient "inducement"!
Re: I can do that!
You could always cut out the middle man and outsource it to the outfit that was going to run the government's pr0n, sorry, 'adult entertainment' ID database. Apart from their database 'skills', I imaging they already know a lot about ill-gotten gains
Can this really be that complicated*?
Surprised they've not just opted for the "de-facto" spreadsheet solution...
*Ignoring "political objectives", of course.
£2Bn over 15 years?
Doesn't sound like they've been finding all that much then.
Doesn't the EU attribute £7Bn to prostitution alone when decided the UKs "GDP" figure to use for "contribution" purposes?
Well at least ...
... you folks are keeping track of it. Over here, when they bust criminals, the sheriff ends up with a new pickup truck.
Lets get smurt and have some fun...
Why not build a document database with blockchain to make sure we can track updates to the document(s)
And each document would represent each piece of confiscated goods.
Lets be honest, the UK Home Office has already chosen Microsoft. Your bid is really just to help provide them with leverage to negotiate a lower price.