EES digital borders delays: French IT firm reported to be largely to blame

One of France’s largest IT companies is largely to blame for the repeated delays to the European Entry/Exit System (EES), according to the leading US business media Bloomberg.

Bloomberg has reported on investigations it carried out into internal correspondence between EU officials and contractors. 

It says troubled French IT firm Atos, which supplied IT for the Olympic Games and also works for the French nuclear industry, has been “at the centre” of problems that have seen the EU’s new digital borders system put off four times to date.

The company, in a consortium with IBM and Italian company Leonardo SpA, is reported to have been building the central IT database systems as contractors for the EU’s agency for large-scale IT projects, EU-Lisa.

Bloomberg claims Atos was “in charge of the bulk of the work and at the centre of many of the problems”, according to hundreds of pages of documents seen by Bloomberg and investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports as well as people familiar with the subject.

Bloomberg states the documents “show how Atos effectively slowed work by only partially installing equipment, misplacing parts, taking weeks to fix bugs and often sending teams lacking in experience, leading to missed deadlines and millions in additional maintenance costs”.

It adds: “The consortium’s inability to meet deadlines became clear early on. Central and back-up data centres were completed eight months after a July 2020 deadline, according to an EU-Lisa letter addressed to the companies dated April 11, 2022.”

“After that, the consortium ‘missed all milestones,’” the letter reportedly said.

Difficulties with central database 

Difficulties completing the central IT database system to which data on non-EU/EEA/Swiss travellers will be sent back from external Schengen border crossing points across Europe have long been reported to be crucial to the delays.

The system is now expected to be phased in. 

Read more: Plans for how EES digital border checks will be ‘phased in’ explained 

The then Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson admitted that her latest announced launch date of November 10, 2024 was “off the table” at a meeting in October. 

She said this was partly because three countries – including France – had failed to report readiness, as they are required to do before the scheme can begin.

French ports and airports, notably, had said they had lacked time properly to test equipment that will be used to collect passenger data.

However, she added: “We also have some concerns when it comes to the resilience of the system.”

Years of delays

The European Commission had first called for an EES to better log entries and exits of ‘third-country’ citizen short-stay visitors to the Schengen area as long ago as February 2008; though it took until 2017 for regulations to be passed allowing it.

A first target was set for launch in the first half of 2022, this was then put off to May 2023, late 2023, late 2024 and now, 2025.

Bloomberg reports IBM to have “developed some of the system’s overall architecture and managed the project”, Leonardo “provided cybersecurity”, while Atos “was tasked with building EES’s hardware and software… the core part of the project, which represented about two-thirds of the work.”

In the April 11 letter, the media says EU-Lisa complained that Atos often sent “young teams with no experience to perform complex tasks” and “in one case, the consortium took more than six weeks to ‘deploy a single bug fixing release team’, illustrating its ‘lack of competence’ in critical moments.”

However, unnamed EU officials are also reported as telling the media that EU-Lisa should also shoulder some blame because, while building such a complex system requires some outsourcing, they had “outsourced everything, even project management”.

EU-Lisa and the firms are also reported to have been under pressure from outgoing Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, who had hoped to see everything up and running before she left.

In August she announced she had set a start date of November 10, saying: “That will be a great day: Entry/Exit System Day.”

Read more: New EU border checks to launch November 10 – official 

Atos and EU-Lisa declined to comment when asked by Bloomberg; we have also reached out to them.

Atos employed around 100,000 staff as of 2023 and had revenues that year of more than €10 billion.

However, it has been facing a series of financial setbacks that have seen its market value drop from some €8 billion in 2020 to around €74 million today. 

It has been subject to a judicial plan de sauvegarde and is undergoing restructuring to stave off bankruptcy after what French financial media Les Echos describes as a “nightmarish year”.