"We're not corrupt, just incompetent"<p>Get external auditors to come in and look at the system. Unless the data is corrupt, there is a way of getting it into a useful and queryable form. It would be a shame for this investigation to quietly die because of prevarication from some gifted bureaucrats.
From what I understand 'civil forfeiture' is basically a legalised shakedown, the police can stop anyone and take whatever money they have. Canada actually issued a travel advisory over it ( <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140915/09500928521/canadian-news-outlet-warns-canadians-that-us-law-enforcement-officers-will-pull-them-over-seize-their-cash.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140915/09500928521/canad...</a> )<p>So is it really surprising there's zero records kept? In other news, the dog ate my homework!
A reasonable thing to do would to stop taking people's property until they have a system to account for its whereabouts.<p>I'm not saying that has any affect on reality, just that it would be a reasonable thing to do.
It is by no means an excuse for them, but having done some work in the government contractor sector, this is not an impossible scenario. However, the company that was contracted to build it should probably be forced to remedy that soon, or pay.
this sounds like stonewalling to me. maybe they weren't counting on the optics of the headline's phrasing sounding as charged as it does, but this reminds me strongly of, for instance, the FBI intentionally being obtuse in their processing of FOIA requests for sensitive subjects. they're not figuring out the numbers because the headline "$x hundred million seized by NYPD from citizens in 2015" sounds even worse.
Im currently working on a project for a large refined products company that is run by IBM. Its totally plausible that they created a bad solution. The last 3-4 projects Ive worked on were run by Big 4 consulting companies, and with each I've become more convinced that they are a drain on the economy.
If this were some ancient 20+ year old proprietary system that no one wanted to touch, I might buy it.<p>But a system built in 2012 can't provide a report on total cash seized? Honestly?
> The system...was built on top of SAP's enterprise resource planning software platform and IBM's DB2 database by Capgemini in 2012, and was used as a flagship case study by the company.<p>That's just embarrassing.