Police software "Scribe": six officials fined €18,000, damage of €30 million
The Court of Auditors has sanctioned six people linked to the fiasco of the "Scribe" software, which was abandoned after six years. The financial damage is estimated at €30.21 million.
Six convicted following failure of police software "Scribe", damage of €30 million
The Court of Auditors handed down fines totalling €18,000 on Friday against six people responsible for the "Scribe" computer programme, according to reporting by Google News FR — Crime (fr). This software, designed to facilitate the drafting of criminal proceedings within the national police, was abandoned after six years of drift, for a total cost valued at €257 million.
Launched in 2015, "Scribe" was intended to be a common tool for the police and the gendarmerie. However, the gendarmerie quickly withdrew from the project, leaving the general directorate of the national police (DGPN) to assume project ownership, and the interior security technology and information systems service to assume project management. After six years of wandering, the programme was definitively abandoned.
In its ruling, the contentious business chamber of the Court of Auditors identified a series of failures to meet obligations of "monitoring, organisation and oversight" of the project, qualified as "serious collective fault" that led to the failure of the scheme. As early as last October, a 500-page order had revealed the scale of the fiasco, valued at €257 million. In February 2026, the prosecutor general at the Court of Auditors had referred six people involved before the contentious business chamber, among whom were two former directors of the national police and two former secretaries general of the Interior Ministry.
The chamber nonetheless recognised that it had not been possible to attribute to any one of the people in question "a failure that would be the major cause of the failure". The faults identified thus form "an indissoluble whole corresponding to the qualification of complex infraction". As for the financial damage, estimated at €30.21 million, the chamber similarly concluded that it was "indivisible", finding "it impossible to attribute part of the damage to any particular failure or to any particular person".
Individual sentences were nonetheless varied: two of the convicted must each pay €6,000 in fines, two others €4,000 each, and the two remaining defendants will each face a symbolic fine of one euro.
Source: Google News FR — Crime (fr)