But the F.B.I's "virtual case file" system, the last in a three-part computer upgrade totaling more than half a billion dollars, has proved the most difficult.
A key system component developed by the Computer Sciences Corporation, known as the Virtual Case File, was originally expected to be running by Saturday.
Problems with the "virtual" case file project have been well documented for many months, but the acknowledgement Thursday from the F.B.I. offered the clearest indication yet that the system may be headed for extinction.
Gregory V. Serio, the state superintendent of insurance, said that the arrests yesterday were part of the largest case of its type in state history, and that the ring operated "a virtual case study of the different kinds of fraud".
Mr. Leahy said lawmakers had pushed the bureau for "realistic assessments" of the Virtual Case File's performance, amid increasingly glum reports in the news media and in government about its chances for success.
The project was called Virtual Case File, or V.C.F., and it would ultimately cost over six hundred million dollars before finally being abandoned, in early 2005, unfinished and never deployed.
