WASHINGTON – Some FBI officials began raising doubts about the bureau’s attempts to create a computerized case management system as early as 2003, two years before the $170 million project was abandoned altogether, according to a confidential report to the House Appropriations Committee.

By 2004, the report found, the FBI had identified 400 problems with early versions of the troubled software – but never told the contractor. The bureau also went ahead with a $17 million testing program last December, even though it was clear by then that the software would have to be scrapped, according to the review.

The 32-page report – written by the House committee’s Surveys and Investigations staff and obtained by the Washington Post – indicates the FBI passed up many chances to cut its losses with the Virtual Case File (VCF), instead forging ahead with a system that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $100 million in wasted expenditures.

The report chronicles a list of errors and misjudgments made during the software project’s troubled history, from assigning underqualified personnel to poor oversight and inadequate planning. And while the bureau has enacted important reforms in its information technology efforts in recent months, one FBI official warned that the bureau remains far behind where it should be.

“We are still crawling,” the unidentified official told investigators.

FBI officials said last week that the bureau has undertaken a broad and rapid restructuring that will solve many of the problems outlined in the report. They also said a new program – code-named Sentinel – will rely on off-the-shelf software rather than the kind of custom approach that contributed to many of the problems with VCF.

“To say we’re crawling is inaccurate,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We are building a system from the ground up and have made real progress.”

The House committee’s report is the latest in a series of damning evaluations of the collapse of VCF, which was formally dumped in March after FBI Director Robert Mueller concluded it was already outdated and did not perform as expected.

The system was part of Trilogy, a $581 million FBI program that includes a new computer network and thousands of new high-speed personal computers for agents and analysts. VCF would have been the final major step in the upgrade, providing a modern database for storing case information and allowing agents to share and search files electronically.