Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Case Overview

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's mandate is to promote safe homes and safe communities by enforcing the laws of Canada, preventing crime, and maintaining peace, order and security. To meet the growing problem of economic crime of all types, the RCMP has developed RECOL (Reporting Economic Crime Online), which provides a single collection point for lodging complaints on traditional or Internet-based crime.

Customer Overview

Founded as the North-West Mounted Police in 1873, today the RCMP is a national organization more than 20,000 strong. In the fall of 2000, together with its partners, the RCMP truly stepped into a new era of policing when the force started to develop a new tool to allow victims of economic crime and other concerned citizens to quickly report incidents of economic crime to the appropriate investigative agencies at the same time

Business Challenge

The initiative, RECOL (Reporting Economic Crime Online), is designed to offer citizens a single point of entry, via phone, fax or Internet, to lodge a complaint concerning fraud or other economic crimes, and have it directed quickly and efficiently around the globe to appropriate law enforcement or investigative agencies for action. Once a report is collected using RECOL, it can then, at the complainant's request, be disseminated in real-time to other partners.

The RECOL initiative will be launched to the public in October 2003. Working together with the Ontario Provincial Police, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other partners, the RCMP is striving to educate people about fraud in Canada. The Policy wants Canadians to understand the importance of reporting it and exposing the fraud by type and perpetrator.

Results

Automating the Complaint Process: The partnership between the RCMP and consultants has resulted in the creation of a system that will enable law enforcement and private sector agencies around the world to work together to keep pace with economic crime. The use of Microsoft technology as the basis for the RECOL Application has helped minimize the costs associated with the development of custom applications while enabling significant costs savings for the RCMP.

The application attaches to Internet Web Services to perform queries based on suspect persons and companies. The Web Services development time required to implement this interface was short in comparison to development time required to develop an interface to a non-Web Services XML interface.

Security was the number one concern in the development of RECOL. The RCMP needed to ensure that all complaints were protected from collection through to dissemination and that only those RECOL partners specifically designated by the complainant were given access to the information provided. This ultimately means there's a higher level of security. Furthermore, .NET has enabled us to build or deploy the security we need, such as encryption, where we need it.
Security is implemented in multiple levels: Service provider, Firewall, Managed switch, Server security access and intrusion detection, and the Microsoft .NET framework, which is server centric. A goal of the development was to minimize exposure to unauthorized intrusions associated with the application and environment.

The technologies

- Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft .NET Framework, VB.Net, ASP.Net, ADO.Net
- Windows Server and SQL Server Enterprise Manager, IIS
- Microsoft Project, Microsoft MapPoint .NET, SOAP Web Services
- MS Excel for the data dictionary and Visio drawing and diagramming software



 

 

Solution

Following a bidding process, the RCMP chose Conet-Tech consultants through the Ajilon Consulting Services. The consultants’ team developed a Microsoft-based software solution for the collection, analysis and packaging of consumer complaints to the law enforcement agencies involved in RECOL. The Royal Police is anticipating that the application will collect and disseminate more than 1,000 complaints per month initially with rapid growth anticipated soon after launch.

RECOL is a unique project that is unduplicated anywhere in the world. RECOL takes existing complaint collection methods to a whole new level with global reach to help prevent fraud.

The overall development environment was completely virtual, with Code construction separate from Database construction. This flexibility makes for a more friendly development environment, while helping to reduce administrative costs.