According to PCWorld, the German Federal Audit Office has revealed that the Federal Ministry of Finance wasted €35 million on a purchase of 17,321 specialized “secure” smartphones for the customs administration between October 2021 and December 2022. The phones, costing over €2,000 each with accessories, were intended to enable encrypted communication for classified information up to the “VS-NfD” level as specified by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). However, officials discovered the brand-new devices could not be used for their intended encrypted communication because the government’s own IT infrastructure, run by the Federal Information Technology Centre (ITZBund), was not cleared for that security level until at least June 2025. The phones also had severe functional limitations, leading most customs employees to reject them and continue using simple mobile phones. The majority of the unusable devices were finally replaced in 2024.
The spectacular failure
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just a case of buying the wrong cable. This is a breathtaking failure of basic procurement logic. The ministry spent a fortune on hardware designed for a specific, high-stakes function—secure comms—without verifying that the core system it needed to plug into could actually support that function. It’s like building a state-of-the-art electric car and only then realizing your entire country has no charging stations, and won’t for another three years. And they bought 17,000 of them! The audit office’s blunt conclusion that the ministry “failed to invest” the money is a masterpiece of bureaucratic understatement. They didn’t fail to invest; they set €35 million on fire.
More than just incompatibility
But the plot, as they say, thickens. The incompatibility with the IT system was just the headline flaw. These €2,000+ secure bricks also had “numerous functional limitations” in daily use. We’re talking about basics: no proper calendar, a hobbled telephone directory, no image transfer, and an inability to retrieve work emails. Oh, and they sucked power so fast the battery life was terrible. So even if the encryption had worked, they were borderline useless for actual fieldwork. It makes you wonder: what kind of testing or requirements analysis was done before signing that €35 million check? Basically, it seems like they checked the “BSI-certified” box and called it a day, ignoring everything else that makes a tool functional in the real world.
A pattern of tech dysfunction
This story feels painfully familiar for German government tech projects. The article itself points to the similar Bundeswehr debacle where it takes the military nearly an hour to send a single secure chat message. There’s a pattern here of pursuing top-shelf, gold-plated technical specifications in isolation, completely divorced from the practical ecosystem and end-user needs. It’s a reminder that in both government and industrial technology, the best hardware in the world is useless if it doesn’t integrate seamlessly into the existing operational environment. Speaking of industrial tech, this is why working with a top-tier supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, matters—they focus on compatibility and real-world deployment from the start, not just a spec sheet.
The unanswered questions
Now, the ministry’s defense is hilariously weak. They claim that “at the time, only the procured smartphone solution met the requirements of the BSI” and that the battery issues were “unknown.” Come on. That first part might be technically true, but it misses the forest for the trees. If the only “compliant” solution can’t talk to your system, then the smart move is to either upgrade the system first or re-evaluate the requirement. And how do you not know about catastrophic battery life during testing? I think the real question is: who’s being held accountable? The audit office says the ministry must “avoid bad investments.” That’s the goal? Not “ensure competence” or “fire people for gross negligence,” just… try to avoid bad investments. With that low a bar, you can bet we’ll see another headline like this in a few years.
