BERN. The computer system that records every foreign national living in Switzerland is late, over its original budget, and now being slowed further by the Confederation’s savings drive. That is the finding the Federal Audit Office published into the rebuild of ZEMIS, the Central Migration Information System, and it lands on a register the country cannot simply switch off.
ZEMIS is how the State Secretariat for Migration keeps the personal data of foreign residents. The Confederation uses it. So do the cantons and the communes, for asylum procedures and for naturalisations. The secretariat has known for some time that the present system has to be replaced, and that the replacement would cost more than first advertised. The bill is already above CHF 190 million.
Savings that buy delay
The audit office says the difficulties have not stopped. Patrick Treichler, the project auditor, said the federal savings measures mean planned work cannot be carried out at the planned scale, and above all not at the planned speed. The result, he said, is delay, and delay on a project of this kind becomes extra cost.
A second source of work is outside Bern. The secretariat has to build the requirements of the European treaties into the new system. That is additional labour, the auditor notes, and additional labour on a slowed timetable is another reason the dates slip. The audit office wants the secretariat to rewrite its plan around those conditions rather than pretend the old schedule still holds.
An old system with a live job
The urgency is not abstract. Treichler said the systems are ageing and should be replaced very soon. “With every delay, the risks of system failures rise,” he said, failures that would hit the secretariat’s ability to do its job. A register used for asylum and citizenship is not a back-office experiment. If it stops, casework stops with it.
The politics are the familiar ones of a savings programme. Cutting a project that is already too expensive looks like discipline. Cutting the pace of a replacement that auditors say is urgent looks like a saving that will be paid twice: once in overrun, and once if the old system fails before the new one is ready. The secretariat has not been told to abandon the rebuild. It has been told, in effect, to do it with less room to do it on time.
What residents will notice, if the auditor is right, is not a headline about software. It is a permit, a hearing or a naturalisation file that waits because the register behind it is being nursed past its design life. The audit office has asked for a plan that matches the money and the treaty work actually in front of the secretariat. Until that plan exists, CHF 190 million is a floor, not a forecast.