Scribe Software: Six Officials Fined €18,000 Over €30 Million Fiasco
The Court of Auditors has sentenced six former officials of the police IT project "Scribe" to fines for serious breaches. The financial damage is estimated at €30.21 million.
Scribe Software Fiasco: Court of Auditors Condemns Six Officials to Fines
Six people involved in the "Scribe" computer programme — designed for drafting criminal procedures within the national police — were sentenced on Friday 28 August by the contentious business chamber of the Court of Auditors to a combined total of €18,000 in fines, according to Google News FR — Crime (fr). This project, abandoned after six years of drift, generated financial damage estimated at €30.21 million.
Breaches Described as "Serious Collective Fault"
In its ruling, the contentious business chamber drew up a list of breaches of obligations concerning "monitoring, organisation and management" of the project, which it described as constituting a "serious collective fault" that directly led to the failure of "Scribe". The court nonetheless specified that it had not been possible to attribute to any one of the persons concerned "a breach that would be the major cause of the failure".
The breaches identified thus formed "an indissoluble whole corresponding to the classification of complex infraction". Similarly, the chamber found it "impossible to impute a portion of the damage to any one breach or to any one person", concluding that this damage was "indivisible".
Highly Unequal Individual Sentences
Despite this finding of collective responsibility, the chamber imposed individual fines of very different amounts. Two of the convicted parties must pay €6,000 each, two others €4,000 each, whilst the two remaining parties will pay only one euro each as a symbolic amount.
Among the six people brought before the contentious business chamber were two former directors of the national police and two former secretary-generals of the Ministry of the Interior.
A Project Launched in 2015, Abandoned Six Years Later
Launched in 2015, the "Scribe" software was initially designed as a tool shared by the police and gendarmerie for drafting criminal procedures. Very quickly, the gendarmerie withdrew from the project, leaving the directorate-general of the national police (DGPN) to assume overall management responsibility, and the technology and information systems service for interior security to assume operational responsibility. After six years of difficulties, the programme was definitively abandoned.
A 500-Page Order Had Already Highlighted the Fiasco
In October last, a 500-page order from the Court of Auditors had already revealed the scale of this failure, whose total cost had then been evaluated at €257 million. In February 2026, the prosecutor-general before the Court of Auditors decided to bring the six people involved in the management of the project before the contentious business chamber.
The ruling delivered on Friday constitutes the latest episode of a fiasco that is both financial and operational, affecting a central aspect of the work of investigators: the digital drafting of criminal procedures.
Source: Google News FR — Crime (fr)