EU's €212M border IT project lands IBM and Atos in legal water

After years of missed deadlines, ballooning costs, and a blame game over who was responsible, Brussels has finally called in the lawyers

The European Union has dragged IBM, Atos, and Leonardo into court over years of delays to its troubled €212 million smart border system, which finally went live after missing a string of deadlines and leaving travelers stuck in airport queues.

The lawsuit dates back to December 22, 2025, when eu-LISA, the agency behind the EU's fingerprint-and-facial-image border checks for non-EU travelers, filed its claim in an Estonian court.

The lawsuit was buried in eu-LISA's 2025 financial accounts, published in July, with no mention of who was being sued. The Financial Times has since named the three companies after obtaining letters exchanged with the agency.

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In a statement to The Register, eu-LISA confirmed it had initiated proceedings "in line with the Agency’s responsibility to protect the EU’s financial interests."

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"The proceedings concern the system’s development phase and have no impact on its current operation. EES (entry exit system)  is fully operational," the agency said, declining to discuss the ongoing case.

The EES was supposed to be ready in 2022 yet wasn't live until October 2025 and was only fully operational from April. Travelers have since had to contend with hours-long airport queues and fingerprint scanners that reportedly struggle with sweaty fingers. Behind the scenes, things weren't going much better, with the consortium and eu-LISA spending years arguing over missed deadlines, financial penalties and who was to blame.

IBM Belgium and Atos Belgium were already arguing over penalties back in October 2021, when they disputed a fine from eu-LISA and pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors beyond their control as reasons for the delays.

By February 2022, the consortium was pushing back against another set of deadlines, warning that the agency's timetable was unrealistic.

"Ignoring reality is not prudent and will not help to achieve the plan," the companies wrote, according to the FT. "On the contrary, working with an unrealistic plan will cause frustration for all stakeholders."

The consortium also criticized eu-LISA's "overall governance," suggesting relations between the two sides had become rather frosty.

The fallout wasn't cheap. The contract had already grown from €142 million to €212 million in 2021, and the delays kept adding to the bill.

In its 2022 accounts [PDF], eu-LISA acknowledged difficulties with the consortium and warned of additional costs, with the setbacks also holding up other EU IT projects. By 2023, it had nearly doubled its annual EES budget to €40 million by diverting funds from elsewhere, partly to cover rising hardware and software maintenance costs.

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The FT also reported that IBM agreed in March 2022 to let eu-LISA withhold certain payments while the dispute over damages was resolved.

The original contract expired last year, with a new consortium taking over implementation, although IBM, Atos, and Leonardo remained responsible until August.

The project has attracted scrutiny for more than its ballooning budget. Last year, Atos reportedly used its Moscow office to procure software for the system, raising questions about Russian involvement in sensitive European border infrastructure.

The EU's anti-fraud office, OLAF, found sufficient grounds for further investigation, according to an internal report seen by the FT. However, it referred the matter back to eu-LISA despite describing the agency's initial assessment as insufficient. 

Estonia's Harju County Court confirmed that the civil case had been filed, although no hearings have taken place or been scheduled.

IBM and Atos did not respond to The Register's questions.

The EES may finally be up and running, but the argument over who should foot the bill for getting it there looks far from settled. ®