Temporary Passports to Cover Backlog

Beverly Williams

According to Minister of State in the Ministry of Immigration, Beverly Williams, another system has been substituted in place of the faulty passport machine which is also enabled for machine readable documents.

Beverly Williams, Minister of State, Immigration

“The backup plan is to look at renewal of current passports that have the scanning, that can be scanned, the computerized passports; and those persons who did not have that or have passports that were lost, those would have to use the temporary passports.  We have, I believe, enough temporary passports on hand to support those and those persons, as I said, who have expired passports, the information, we will create a sticker that can be used where the computer can read, that that scanning machine can read those passports.  And that process is almost completed so we are still trying to print but that is causing some wastage but we don’t want that to become significant so we are printing those that are in the system and we are proceeding in the next two weeks or so to have those stickers, the renewal stickers available, along with the temporary passports. What I believe may be misconstrued is that a new system will take six to eight months for development and launch and that is understood but the backup plan may be sufficient to cover that timeline.”