The Illinois State Police broke a $7 million contract with a Virginia DNA testing firm yesterday, alleging it committed serious errors.

The Virginia firm, Bode Technology Group of Springfield, calls itself the largest forensic DNA company in the nation.

It performs work for the Virginia De- partment of Forensic Science and developed the DNA profiles of some 160,000 felons for the Virginia DNA database.

At least 10 other states and the U.S. Department of Justice have hired Bode to perform DNA work, Illinois State Police says.

The state police says Bode reported it found no sperm in 1,200 of the biological samples Illinois sent to the company.

However, when the state police looked at a sample of 51 of those 1,200 cases, it found sperm present in 11 of them, it said.

Illinois authorities did not allege Bode incorrectly identified someone as a suspect in a crime. Instead, they said, Bode failed to recognize the existence of semen that could then have been subjected to DNA testing.

Now, the Illinois authorities say, they must retest all 1,200 samples.

Dr. Kevin McElfresh, executive direc- tor of Bode, said in a prepared statement that the company is disappointed by the Illinois State Police decision.

Illinois authorities said their three-year contract with Bode was for both DNA casework and older methods of biological identification testing.

McElfresh said yesterday that the Illinois complaint does not involve DNA testing.

"Rather, the dispute is over the state's reliance on an older methodology known as serology that requires a person to see a sperm cell under a microscope instead of using the more prevalent, highly accurate DNA test which Bode recommended," he said.

In Virginia, Bode developed the DNA profiles of some 160,000 criminals for the state's DNA data base and is currently conducting DNA testing of 31 old Virginia cases that had not undergone such testing before. None of them involve sperm searches.

Virginia's DNA databank, which now holds the profiles of more than 236,000 criminals and arrestees, is searched by computer in criminal cases where DNA evidence has been recovered. If the evidence matches someone's DNA profile in the database, that person may then be considered a suspect in the new crime.

Paul B. Ferrara, director of the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, said yesterday that Virginia has never contracted with Bode to perform criminal-case work.

"We have always elected to keep crime-scene evidence in-house," he said.

Ferrara said he had no reason to question the quality of the work performed by Bode on the 160,000 DNA databank profiles. "We reviewed all their work before entering data into the system. Very extensive quality control was required by the contract," he said. That included the blind testing of random samples.

However, Betty Layne DesPortes, chairwoman of the jurisprudence section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, said the errors reported by Illinois authorities involved fundamental laboratory work: "the recognition and identification of biological fluids."

"If the laboratory's internal quality control procedures are disabled, the laboratory cannot be trusted to provide reliable results," said DesPortes, who is also a Richmond-area defense attorney.

Because the U.S. Justice Department and other states use Bode for DNA work, Larry Trent, director of the Illinois State Police, wrote letters to law enforcement officials in the 49 other states about what his state had discovered.

"We will not tolerate errors in this type of work. I am outraged that a company with their reputation would conduct business in this manner, and we're not going to let them get away with it," Trent said yesterday in a prepared statement.

Bode and the Virginia state lab have worked closely together over the years.

In a 1999 Internet promotion from a company that manufactures DNA testing technology, McElfresh noted Bode's 1998 contract with Virginia to run tests on the 160,000 databank samples.

"There is a fundamentally close relationship between [Bode] and the state. Because the commonwealth of Virginia considers The Bode Technology Group to be an extension of the Virginia laboratory, it makes the relationship work quite successfully," he said.

Gov. Mark R. Warner recently appointed McElfresh to the newly created, 13-person scientific advisory committee for the Virginia Department of Forensic Science.

The committee was created in the wake of an independent study that found errors in testing performed by the then Virginia division of Forensic Science in the case of former death-row inmate Earl Washington Jr.

The discovery of those errors this year led to an independent review of more than 160 other DNA cases handled by the state lab. That review is still in progress.

Washington was nearly executed for a 1982 rape and capital murder in Culpeper. State DNA testing in 1993 and in 2000 led to his pardon and implicated a convicted rapist now in prison for another rape.

DesPortes said the problem allegedly identified by Illinois is the same problem found by independent auditors in the Washington case -- errors were made analyzing the evidence, and the state lab failed to recognize and correct the errors.

Bode has enjoyed a high reputation. In 1991, the company began DNA testing for the military to identify the remains of servicemen and servicewomen killed in Vietnam, Korea and World War II. In 1998, the company identified the remains of the Vietnam War's unknown soldier.

The company also worked to help identify the remains of those killed in the World Trade Center attacks.