June 29, 2005
Test Faults Processing of Passports
By ERIC LIPTON


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/polit ... nted=print

WASHINGTON, June 28 - The names of more than 30 fugitives, including 9 murder suspects and one person on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most-wanted list, did not trigger any warnings in a test of the nation's passport processing system, federal auditors have found.

Insufficient oversight by the State Department allows criminals, illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists to fraudulently obtain a United States passport far too easily, according to a report on the test by the Government Accountability Office to be released Wednesday.

The lapses occurred because passport applications are not routinely checked against comprehensive lists of wanted criminals and suspected terrorists, according to the report, which was provided to The New York Times by an official critical of the State Department who had access to it in advance. For example, one of the 67 suspects included in the test managed to get a passport 17 months after he was first placed on an F.B.I. wanted list, the report said.

The State Department also too often fails to aggressively pursue leads that could allow the government to catch black-market sellers of fake identification documents essential to getting a fraudulent passport, said Michael Johnson, a former State Department security official.

Once issued, a passport typically becomes a critical tool for illegal immigrants who are seeking work or who want to travel internationally, as well as for people involved in drug smuggling, money laundering, Social Security fraud and even terrorism, the federal auditors said.
"A fraudulent passport can enable a holder to conceal his true identity and his citizenship," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "These are exactly the kinds of problems that allowed the terrorists to attack our country."
The security committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the subject of passport fraud on Wednesday.

State Department officials said they were already moving to expand the crosschecking of passport applications against more complete lists of suspected criminals and terrorists. But they disputed reports that the department had been lax in its investigation of suspected fraud.

"The United States passport, I believe, is among the most valuable documents on the planet," Maura Harty, assistant secretary for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, said in an interview on Tuesday. "What we have is a tremendous challenge knowing how people who ought not have a passport would like to try to get one from us."

The State Department has long been engaged in a campaign to crack down on passport fraud, which with older, less tamper-proof passports was often simply a matter of switching a photograph.

Current passports have the bearer's image laminated onto the identification page, with a holograph over it. Soon, the State Department plans to issue electronic passports embedded with a computer chip containing a digital image and biographical information about the holder.

But the department has not done enough, federal auditors say, to prevent people using fraudulent documents from getting passports.

Mr. Johnson, who was the special agent in charge of the Miami field office of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security from 2002 to 2004, said the department placed too much emphasis on rapidly processing passport applications. He also said it insufficiently pursued suspicions of fraud, missing opportunities to arrest leaders of crime rings that sold forged documents.

He said that while he was in Miami, he was asked by his bosses to terminate investigations into more than 400 cases because the department did not have enough staff to complete the inquiries within a year. In the G.A.O. report, the State Department did not dispute that many cases had gone unresolved, saying that "the field officers had been encouraged to close old cases."

The real problem, Ms. Harty said, is the ease with which people can obtain fraudulent identification, like birth certificates, to apply for a passport. The State Department, she said, tries to block fraudulent applications by checking them against other records, like Social Security files.

Ms. Harty said that to screen passport applicants better, she had secured commitments from the F.B.I. and the federal Terrorist Screening Center to provide more complete access to records, including the comprehensive list of suspected terrorists.

"Nobody should have a passport in an attempt to flee from prosecution," Ms. Harty said.