The plan put in place in 1989 to renovate the information system for France’s Ministry of Justice has been a true catastrophe, says the Court of Accounts, reported in Le Monde: the project was originally intended to recast the police records system, to computerise the registering of prisoners and to put in place an information system chain for recording civil and criminal procedures – but five years and some $170m later, the results are meagre – the new police record system, for which the aims have been considerably reduced, has been delayed until the end of this year, the system for prisoner information has been reserved only for new penal establishments, and the civil chain of information has been abandoned; the criminal chain, which was intended to be national, will be limited to the Paris region; the Court said the disaster was tied essentially to rivalries among the ministry’s various departments and defects in its overall organisation, which is traditionally poor in administrators trained in public management.
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