Asset Recovery IT - Public Contract Regulations

Descriptions

In accordance with the Public Contract Regulations 2015, as amended (Regulations), the Company is seeking to establish a contract through running a Further Competition under CCS Framework RM6259 Vertical Application Solutions for the provision of an Asset Recovery IT (ARIT) service (Contract).

Serious and organised crime is a threat to national security. Illicit money is the common thread that runs through almost all offending, as criminals use the proceeds of their crime to fund their lifestyle and conduct further crime. Asset Recovery is the power to locate and seize money made by criminals, with the aim of tackling economic crime. This ensures criminal networks are denied the ability to hide, move or use illicit money. Legal powers for tackling economic crime and recovering criminal assets are defined under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA).

Currently the Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD) is a the system used to record asset recovery cases in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, achieved as a result of executing powers under the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) 2002. JARD is a legacy system and is used as a case management tool and database to store the end-to-end details of cases involving asset recovery and is continually updated throughout the lifecycle of each individual case. Assets recovered under the Proceeds of Crime Act (2002) need to be accurately recorded in order to be made available to operational agencies.

JARD has become a barrier to progress for the following reasons:

a) JARD does not provide a view across multiple systems and suffers from technical constraints and service reliability issues;
b) By being a standalone solution, JARD depends on high levels of manual data entry, with associated risks of human error and data inaccuracies, potentially slowing down or frustrating the asset recovery process;
c) JARD also suffers from outages caused by its obsolete technology that risks the entire asset recovery process, both national and internationally; and
d) JARD does not align to cloud first and other government IT strategic directives, making ongoing operations more difficult and expensive.

JARD's issues, summarised above, are resulting in missed asset recovery opportunities due to a lack of integration with other law enforcement databases.

It is expected that replacing JARD with a new Asset Recovery IT (ARIT) service will significantly increase value for money and present new asset recovery opportunities. It would enable substantial efficiency savings through automation and integration with other Law Enforcement databases, improved data integrity/validation and reduce ongoing support and service management costs. Replacing the JARD system with the new Asset Recovery IT (ARIT) service provides opportunity to transform use, increase asset recovery and impact on serious and organised crime activities, while also upgrading the technology in line with current standard.