20 Oct 10. The long-troubled effort to upgrade the FBI’s computerized case files is $100 million over budget and now its contractor
Lockheed Martin will play a smaller role in the project, a U.S. Justice Department report released on Wednesday said. The FBI has struggled for years to upgrade its computer systems, which FBI Director Robert Mueller tried to accelerate after the September 11, 2001 attacks. But there have been numerous setbacks despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Part of the project, known as Sentinel, was halted this year when more problems emerged. The FBI last estimated the whole program to cost $451, but has already spent $405m and still has substantial more work to do.
“We found that while Sentinel has delivered some improvements to the FBI’s case management system, it has not delivered much of what it originally intended,” according to an interim report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine. The report said that the Sentinel project was “approximately $100m over budget and two years behind schedule.” The parts of Sentinel that the FBI has already spent the $405m on was originally only forecast to cost $306m. The FBI slammed the report, saying that it failed to fully reflect the department’s new plan and relied on outdated cost estimates. The agency says it now can finish the project for $20m and will be done next month. (Source: Reuters)