The UK Ministry of Justice has been slammed by the influential Public Accounts Committee for its disastrous electronic tagging programme, branding it a “catastrophic waste of public money” – reports diginomica. Electronic monitoring allows the police, courts or probation services to monitor an offender’s location and their compliance with home curfews. The Ministry of Justice aimed to roll out a new electronic tagging system in 2013 aimed at reducing the cost of tagging and providing wider operational benefits. It is now not expected until 2019, more than five years late, and £60m has been spent. “The problems are those that have befallen many other procurement programmes in government – mismanagement of contracts, a lack of skills, wanting to reinvent the wheel and a dogmatic approach that results in more problems than are necessary,” the report says, and “Reading the MPs’ report, it’s clear that the programme is a classic tale of Whitehall failing to understand the basics of procurement and not learning from a well-documented history of similar failures.” To understand what went wrong read the full article here. And look out for more analysis next week on Spend Matters UK.