257.4 million euros. That is the amount the Court of Accounts assigns to the Scribe-XPN program, a software intended to enable police officers to draft their verbatims since 2016. A written question submitted to the National Assembly on August 11, 2026, under number 17697, reprises this figure drawn from a settlement order issued on October 16, 2025 by the Court of Accounts’ Litigation Chamber. And the worst part isn’t the amount itself: there is no operational deployment planned before the third quarter of 2028, at best.
This colossal total isn’t limited to the invoices from IT contractors. The Court details the financial harm of the failure by specifying that it includes the costs of development foregone, the costs of support missions, the costs of maintaining the existing software that would have to be replaced, and the cost of investigators’ lost time. every minute wasted by a police officer firefighting with a faulty tool was quantified and added to the bill. And those minutes accumulate: police union organizations estimated the daily loss of time for investigators at “30 to 45 minutes per day” due to the tedious manipulations imposed by the software.
Key takeaways
- Why did a project started in 2015 cost ten times more than estimated in 2019?
- How could a software require 17 clicks to save a PDF file?
- Who are the sixteen officials named in the Court of Accounts report for this fiasco?
A project born from a good idea, bogged down in interdepartmental wrangling
Launched in December 2015, its development stretched over more than 11 years for a cost estimated by the Court of Accounts at over 257.4 million euros, encompassing development costs and the opportunity cost. The initial ambition was straightforward: provide the police and the gendarmerie with a joint tool for drafting criminal procedures, replacing outdated software. But this shared governance exploded in mid-flight. This dual governance did not work: the gendarmerie was satisfied with its internal tool, and in November 2016, it pulled out of the project amid “interpersonal rivalries” and “tensions,” leaving it to be steered solely by the General Directorate of the National Police.
The project then changed its name as often as it changed leaders. Initially named LRPPN, then LRP/NG, then Scribe, and finally XPN after a relaunch in 2021. In 2017, the administration even organized an internal consultation to rebrand the program to improve its image among the police officers who were supposed to use it one day. A cosmetic choice that did not address the substance: the software remained, year after year, technically unusable.
Technical dysfunctions bordered on the absurd. The software required 17 mouse clicks just to save a file in PDF format, a tool unusable on a daily basis for officers who draft dozens of procedures every day. Even more for investigative work: Scribe still did not allow saving any PDF file larger than 5 MB, i.e., less than a high-resolution photograph, according to the current XPN program director cited in the ordonnance. Practically, investigators had no choice but to degrade image quality, making them difficult to use by the justice system. A paradox for a tool intended to secure the criminal chain.
Sixteen officials named in the crosshairs, a delay that keeps slipping
Magistrate Michèle Coudurier did not stop at simply noting a failure. Her order, a 500-page document, names specific officials within the Ministry of the Interior. The Court of Accounts accuses sixteen senior officials of “breach of budgetary control rules” and “failure of oversight,” among them two directors-general of the National Police, a General of the Gendarmerie, several directors and technical advisers, and the ministry’s secretaries-general, criticized for not exercising the required oversight. These charges, however, are not automatically accompanied by sanctions: possible financial penalties remain hypothetical.
From a strictly budgetary perspective, the trajectory is dizzying. In 2019, ex-Dinsic (the interministerial digital directorate of the state) put the total cost of Scribe at 15.1 million euros. Six years later, the overall bill had risen by more than tenfold. The difference largely stems from the expansion of the accounting perimeter: the magistrate of the Court of Accounts includes development costs, but above all the “time lost by investigators” from 2022 to 2026. A calculation method that changes everything and explains why the figures reported by different administrations over the years could appear inconsistent with one another.
The lingering question that really irks front-line police officers remains: when will the new tool finally be delivered? Deployment is not planned before the third quarter of 2028, a date the Court of Accounts itself considers highly optimistic given the accumulated delays and remaining technical complexity. A caution that says a lot: even the institution charged with auditing public accounts doubts that the announced schedule is tenable. In the meantime, investigators continue to work daily with an aging software, built in the 1990s, while the Scribe-XPN fiasco’s bill keeps growing.
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Sources: questions.assemblee-nationale.fr | oeil.europarl.europa.eu | fr.tradingview.com
