Jill Bonnet

Yeah.

So it aimed to upgrade Immigration New Zealand's identity management system, which was outdated and, you know, had algorithms that dated back to 2012.

And it was just an upgrade at that point, hence the name.

it was I think a couple of years later that it morphed into something that was bigger and that's when it didn't go through its due diligence and the case that would have had to have been made for for this bigger project anyway yes in terms of what it actually wanted to do it was like identity fraud uh making sure that you know they could match the biometric and biographic details um like photographs and fingerprints and um so it was a very complex project and uh

I'm not sure how much of it has actually, you know, will still be able to be used from what the minister says it's been wasted.

So a lot of the problems were with the cyber security element of it.

There were bugs within the system.

So they were trying to resolve them.

I think the overriding issue is that this was meant to be an out-of-the-box solution and it ended up being a really kind of a system that had to be very much morphed into an INZ system.

And the problems that cropped up from that, particularly from 2024 onwards, seem to have been at the base of it.

But the other issues, I mean, there are so many.

You read through it and it's kind of littered with

things that they could have and should have been doing or checking.

I remember asking them for more information because I hadn't seen a cabinet paper and wondered you know what the actual project was about and then there were a few emails back and forth and got some information about the financing and obviously what the biometric capability update actually is was and then it became clear that well they said that it was even at that point in 2024 due to

be going live later that year but then there was some more information that said that the cost of it had gone up to 40 million and obviously we'd been told that 35 million was the cutoff for when they would have had to have put in a cabinet paper and so I inquired about that and it all went quiet for a little while and then I had an interview later in 2024 explaining that it was again being put back

I think by that point, looking at the report, it seems that the two projects that they talk about in the report had been separated and therefore the budget for the BCU had gone back under the magical $35 million.

Yeah, I guess there must be some, the budget was the whole of life costs.

So some of that will be stuff that hasn't actually been racked up yet.

Yeah, and that was last year.

I think that the finances are really interesting actually because if you dig into it a little bit deeper, it's clear that the 35 million that they've insisted was the amount spent on that.