Government report urges overhaul to passport issuing process

The finding of U.S. congressional investigators indicates that the State Department has not adequately overhauled its passport issuing process and is at risk of creating a huge backlog of applications again this summer. The State Department is insisting that is now able to handle an increased demand, it reported late in the week.

The Government Accountability Office stated that the State Department has not come up with a “comprehensive, long-term strategy” for modernizing the passport application process, according to its report issued on Friday.

U.S. lawmakers requested an investigation into the application backlog of spring and summer 2007, which resulted from an unprecedented number of applications due to new travel rules. Over 18 million applications crippled the State Department’s passport operations.

“The 2007 surge in passport demand exposed serious deficiencies in State’s passport issuance process,” the report noted. “Passport wait times reached record highs, leading to inconvenience and frustration for many thousands of Americans.”

The State Department “needs to rethink its entire end-to-end passport issuance process, including each of the entities involved in issuing a passport, and develop a formal strategy for prioritizing and implementing improvements to this process,” commented the investigators.

A spokesman for the State Department’s passport operations, Gonzalo Gallegos, indicated that he had not yet seen the report and wouldn’t be able to comment except to say that the department made a number of changes aimed to improving passport processing. He added that no similar backlog exists this year.

Thanks to the Associated Press for the quotes above. More information is available on www.ap.org.

www.gao.gov