Customs tool held up
Customs officers will have to wait for up to another two years for cuttingedge crime-fighting software that should help them find drugs after the software failed to pass tests.
The ‘‘risk and intelligence tool’’ should be the icing on the cake of a $207 million investment in a Joint Border Management System (JBMS) that is already a few years behind its original schedule.
The tool is designed to analyse up to about 150 pieces of information on each incoming shipment within a couple of minutes and give Customs a ‘‘percentage chance’’ of it involving illegal activity.
Customs contracted IBM to build JBMS, many parts of which are in place.
But Customs has assumed responsibility for the final intelligence features after that software failed to complete IBM tests in June, chief information officer Murray Young said.
‘‘We will deliver that ourselves over the next 12 to 24 months. We are all disappointed the project is significantly late.’’
Young refused to say whether Customs would pay IBM less money than originally intended as a result of it bringing the work back inhouse.
Spokeswoman Helen Keys said that information was ‘‘subject to an obligation of confidence’’. The Sunday-Star Times is appealing the refusal to provide that information to the Ombudsman.
As well as predicting risks, the intelligence software would also handle the job of assigning Customs officers to intercept packages it flagged as more likely to be illegal.
What Customs was trying to do was ‘‘world-leading’’, Young said.
‘‘We are reviewing all the information we have got about the airfreight trade and situations where we found drugs and when we didn’t, and using that to build up a ‘probablistic model’ that will probably have 100 to 150 elements to it.’’
Those elements could include the country of origin, the item’s description and even the colour of packaging.
‘‘We can then in the future look at every transaction that comes through and in a minute-to-twominute window say ‘what is the probability this has drugs in it?’,’’ Young said.