Image: Highway Patrol Images.
Australia’s law enforcement information-sharing agency CrimTrac is on the hunt for a software solution provider to develop and deliver a large scale firearm tracing system designed to stop the illegal trafficking of guns across Australia.
The pursuit of unlawful weapons will come under the government’s planned National Firearms Interface (NFI), replacing the National Firearms Licencing and Registration System (NFLRS), which will be capable of tracking the lifecycle of a firearm from its importation or manufacture for sale in Australia, through to its exportation or destruction.
This ambitious tracking system will retain the gun’s history and record its ‘events’ and will provide notification of inter-jurisdictional firearm transfers. This information will be shared between police departments at the federal, state and territory levels.
The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has detailed the need for such a system that tracks firearms from ‘cradle to grave’, but there have been many problems in realising it, including an historical lack of reliability in the recording of necessary data across different jurisdictions.
Although the system has been in development since June 2012, CrimTrac has been under enormous pressure to speed up its delivery of the NFI since calls for a more aggressive crackdown on illegal guns have grown louder since the tragic Martin Place siege in December 2014.
Now CrimTrac Procurement has released a Request for Tender through AusTender for a software solution provider to help deliver the system, with requirements of transition services, third level support, and additional services including ‘new users’, ‘business layer’ services, alerting users when ‘events’ occur, and improvements to firearms referencing.
CrimTrac is seeking to go live with the NFI system by 30th June, 2016 and expects that the contract will be for an initial term of five years, and may be extended for a period or periods of up to five years, with a potential term of up to 10 years.
