CAPACI Project

"Creation of Automated Procedures Against Criminal Infiltration in public contracts - CAPACI" project has been presented by Italian Ministry of Interior (Department of Public Security Coordination and Planning of Police Forces Office) to the European Commission to respond to a Call for Proposal within the ISEC programme "Prevention Of And Fight Against Crime".

In particular, the project has been presented in partnership with DIPE (Department for the Planning and Coordination of Economic Policy established by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers), CBI Consortium and Formez PA and has been awarded by the Commission in order to let the applicant realize the objectives of the project.

The project title commemorates Giovanni Falcone, assassinated at Capaci in 1992, whose success as an anti-mafia magistrate derived partly from the painstaking examination of thousands of bank records. In order to facilitate and automate this kind of action, Italy is building an IT system to monitor financial flows in the supply chain of large public contracts, as part of a general initiative to counter money-laundering and Mafia penetration of major public works. The system will enable authorities to monitor the activity of businesses in these projects, prevent the infiltration of capital of illicit origin and combat the appropriation of public funds by organized crime.

The model requires companies signing a contract to open a dedicated bank account, to carry out all contractual activities through this account only, and to make payments exclusively by means of XML SEPA bank transfers. The use of a dedicated bank account has an important added benefit, in that it makes it possible for investigators to overcome difficulties relating to rights to privacy. Contractors are required to indicate the CUP (Single Project Code) in the bank account and on all bank transfers, making it possible to identify with certainty the project to which the data is referred.

Using the CBI (Customer to Business Interaction) Consortium network, which covers almost the entirety of Italian banks and the Post Office, a focal point has been created which collects data daily on all SEPA payments, as well as statements for all dedicated bank accounts, together with the relevant CUP.

A working group has developed methods to follow the payments and financial flows of the companies monitored, and has also examined the difficulties encountered and the training requirements of companies, banks and their branches, and the characteristics of the IT system for the collection and transmission of data.

These activities have amply demonstrated the feasibilty of the project. For this reason, Italy has designed a second phase with the objective of developing the system and disseminating it internationally. This phase involves capturing data from this focal point and loading it into a database able to analyse, compare and match outcomes and bank statements, and generate reports based on suitable indicators which will act as an alert system to signal significant or suspicious movements.

This would fundamentally transform the nature of criminal investigations in these cases, for the initial impulse for investigation would no longer need to come from a pre-existing suspicion on the part of the investigator, followed by a search for corroborative data, but would be automatically generated by the data itself.

The second phase will last two years - from September 2011 to August 2013 - and involves the following steps:

• developing an automatic alarm system in Italy to signal suspect financial movements in relation to large public contracts,
• analyzing the compatibility of the system with norms, procedures and strategies in other MS,
• testing the system on two large contracts in Italy, and on other contracts in selected EU countries,
• presenting the benefits of the system to the other countries of the EU, and providing training in selected countries,
• providing a set of guidelines to the EC and to other interested countries,
• providing an overview of the feasibility of extending the system to other parts of the EU.

Through this project it would be possible to make the system available immediately to countries already using the SEPA system, and after the necessary adaptations, to all Member States.