Passport chief points to fixes
She says the surge caught her off-guard but is being handled.
By WES ALLISON
Published June 20, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The chief of the nation's passport office acknowledged Tuesday that her agency badly underestimated the deluge of applications spurred by new rules for travel within the Western Hemisphere, mistaking the first signs of the surge last winter for a squall, not the tsunami it turned out to be.
In more than two hours of testimony before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee chaired by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., Maura Harty, the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, took responsibility for delays in passport approvals that have aggravated thousands of Americans for months.
She promised senators the State Department was hiring hundreds of new employees to process applications and expanding or adding passport processing facilities nationwide.
The surge was caused largely by new rules, which went into effect in January, requiring U.S. citizens visiting Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean by air to have passports. But the State Department and a private contractor, Bearing Point, missed their mark by about 1.5-million passports: Rather than the 16.2-million for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 as first projected, Harty said, she now expects 17.7-million.
The stricter rules for visitors traveling by sea and land are scheduled to go in effect in January 2008. But the Bush administration plans to relax those rules, Harty said.
In November, 250,000 more people than projected applied for passports. In January, 600,000 more than projected applied. But the State Department believed that the surge wouldn't continue.
It didn't begin reacting in earnest until late January, when the normal 24-hour turnaround time for Citibank, the private contractor that first processes the applications, hit several weeks.
"We initially and erroneously believed that the bump up in January was because we had made people aware of the (new) regulations, " Harty said.
Each of the 10 senators at Tuesday's hearing told tales of honeymoons postponed, of church missionary trips foiled, of widows driving hours to passport processing centers, only to wait in hourslong lines.
As congressional witnesses go, Harty didn't make an easy pinata. Brisk yet good-natured, she never shirked the blame, and she spent the bulk of her testimony detailing the State Department's solution to the problem:
Hiring 1,400 employees since January. Expanding several regional centers. Keeping its main processing center in Portsmouth, N.H., open all night. Adding a megacenter in Arkansas. Harty's department now is churning out more than 1.5-million passports a month.
But the panel left one thing unsettled: For years, people who paid an extra $60 fee to have their application rushed could apply for a refund if they didn't get their passport in the promised two to three weeks.
Now, Nelson said, hundreds of thousands who paid the extra fee didn't get their passports so quickly.
He said they shouldn't have to apply for a refund.
Harty noted the applications of folks who paid the fee still went to the front of the line, but she promised to get back to him. "I will work with our attorneys ... and come up with a policy."