The federal police’s i-Police IT programme cost 139.4 million euros without a single sub-project being delivered. According to the Court of Audit, the police let the budget dictate the pace and left oversight to external consultants.
i-Police, the federal police’s failed digitalisation project that was halted in December 2025, has calmed political tempers. In a report, the Court of Audit takes stock. As expected, the outcome is very negative: 139.4 million euros of taxpayers’ money was wasted on the project, twice as much as initially estimated.
The programme was meant to replace outdated police applications such as the Algemene Nationale Gegevensbank (ANG), ISLP and Feedis with a single central platform, with real-time access to data in the field. In December 2021, then Minister of the Interior Annelies Verlinden (CD&V) signed a framework agreement with Sopra Steria, the main IT partner. The programme received a budget of 299.7 million euros through 2027.
Four years later, not a single sub-project was finished. Bernard Quintin (MR), the current Minister of the Interior, ruthlessly pulled the plug around Christmas 2025. Since then, mutual accusations and legal proceedings have followed, on which the Court of Audit does not comment.
The i-Police bill
Between 2016 and 2025, the police paid 74.4 million euros to Sopra Steria, licences included. A further 33 million euros went to Focus@GPI, 20.6 million to consultancy, 6.6 million to servers and IT equipment and 4.8 million to support and maintenance. Another 78.5 million euros has been committed but not yet paid.
The Antwerp local police developed Focus@GPI together with the federal police, independently of Sopra Steria. Since March 2023, all police zones have used that mobile app. Of the 30.8 million euros in software licences, 21.6 million euros is no longer of any use. Licences worth 7.3 million were never used, while licences worth 14.2 million became unusable when the programme was halted. The police are claiming that amount back from the IT supplier.
Budget set the pace
The government made no provision for a guaranteed multi-year budget for i-Police. The money came from the interdepartmental provision for counterterrorism, from the recovery and transition plan and, for more than a third of the planned payments (111.4 million euros), from personnel budget that the police did not use up. In the financial plan at the time of the award, 21.5 million euros was already missing for 2025.
To avoid losing available credits, the police committed 75.4 million euros in December 2021. Of that, 52.3 million went to projects and 20.7 million to licences, of which 17.1 million was paid immediately.
The Court of Audit is harsh on the purchase of those licences, which went unused. At the end of 2022, another 86.5 million euros followed, of which 79.3 million came from the recovery plan, even though the first pilot projects were already seriously delayed. “Such costs are a problem if the solutions concerned are not rolled out, are only partly used or if the future of the project they belong to is uncertain.”
Such costs are a problem if the solutions concerned are not rolled out, are only partly used or if the future of the project they belong to is uncertain.
Quick wins not achieved
For the initial phase of the project, two ‘quick wins’ were defined, two objectives to be achieved within twelve to eighteen months. Experts at the ITdaily roundtable said last year that working with ‘quick wins’ can help get a large project off the ground. Small, demonstrable results should then convince the business of the higher goal.
They were an analysis environment and a case management system for international cooperation. Those first projects were meant to show whether Sopra Steria was the right partner. Only after that would the projects for the business processes start, with a stop and go clause as an exit.
Because the police ordered most projects at the same time, that control mechanism did not work, according to the Court of Audit. You can guess that those quick wins were not achieved, yet the project went on. As a result, the police lost ‘a major lever to demand compliant results from the service provider’, the Court of Audit writes.
A contract without a yardstick
The Court of Audit also questions how the contract was awarded. Nine companies applied for the contract and three were selected. In the end, the contract went to Sopra Steria, an IT consultancy originally from France.
The contract contained no precise milestones or acceptance criteria, the Court of Audit notes. Project sheets were submitted ‘in haste’ by Sopra Steria, and only some of them were signed by the police. Even so, they ranked above the specifications and the tender in the hierarchy of contract documents, which weakened or neutralised some agreements from the tender.
Sopra Steria was allowed to invoice part of the project budget every month, up to 80 percent, without delivery. Of the 111.1 million euros committed for projects, the police paid 43.4 million. For three projects, it also paid the final twenty percent (2.4 million euros), which was only due after delivery. Invoices were not systematically checked.
The police applied none of the sanctions in the contract. The management plan arrived eight months late and key figures were replaced without prior agreement, but the flat-rate fine of 20,000 euros for such a replacement was not imposed. The police only requested the performance guarantee a year after signing, and only once: 332,610 euros. Delay penalties applied only to the final milestone.
PLACEHOLDER
The team that managed i-Police on behalf of the police had about thirteen full-time staff, all of them external consultants. The report states that “the police’s recruitment conditions were not suited to recruiting specialised and highly qualified profiles”, which meant the project had to rely on external consultants. They represented the IT directorate in the operational meetings, monitored progress and prepared decisions.
Follow-up of the contract, planning and budget fell woefully short. From September 2023, meetings were no longer even documented. As a result, estimates were never updated. According to the Court of Audit, the problems were known. In 2024, a ‘crisis manager’ was appointed.
The problems the Court of Audit identifies sound all too familiar. At the start of 2025, it already published a scathing report on digitalisation at the Justice department. A lack of strategy, dependence on consultants and little to no control over spending are exactly why the i-Police project also ended in failure.
Standard software still required custom work
The Court of Audit also gives IT partner Sopra Steria a resounding fail. The company built its proposal around some twenty standard packages. With standard software, the police wanted to avoid expensive in-house development and roll out faster. That turned out to be the wrong choice.
The standard software proved hard to install in the secure police environment and could not handle complex business rules. After two years, not a single product was operational. At the end of 2024, i-Police was 41.7 percent complete, without one finished subproject.
In his reply to the Court of Audit, Koen Van Overtveldt, head of the federal police, puts the blame on the supplier. “During implementation, however, it became clear that the contractor could not deliver important components within the planned IT context and environment, or at least only with considerable additional development,” he writes.
Sopra Steria told the Court of Audit that at the start of 2022 it was not prepared to launch all projects at once. The company also points to poorly documented complexity, an immature police environment and resistance within the police. The police, in turn, attribute this to the mediocre quality of the documents Sopra Steria supplied.
Court case must settle question of blame
The i-Police debacle will not be without consequences for the partners and top figures involved. The police want to reclaim 244 million euros from Sopra Steria through the courts: 65 million euros in paid invoices, plus 178.7 million euros in damages. Sopra Steria, for its part, is claiming 6.2 million euros for invoiced and not yet invoiced services, the release of its bank guarantee and compensation for the harm suffered.
The Brussels court of first instance will decide on liability for i-Police. Verlinden is under fire for alleged conflict of interest in the awarding of the contract, because she was on Sopra Steria’s payroll until 2020.
The Court of Audit above all hopes the government will learn lessons from this. It makes thirty recommendations for future IT programmes, ranging from multi-year funding aligned with the planning to a central inventory of licences. The police have meanwhile set up a Digital Transformation Office and a PMO, and no longer let external consultants validate invoices.