Comptroller's Office reveals that Migrations continued to charge for passports that it did not have in stock

The crisis in migration due to the delay in the issuance of passports continues. This Wednesday, hundreds of desperate travelers woke up outside the head office of the National Superintendency of Migration in Breña to be able to process and obtain the Peruvian biometric passport that allows them to leave the country, as it is the only valid identity document in the world.

The lack of passports and failures in the printing system of this document caused last Monday, April 11, that more than 100 people were unable to board their flights and had to pay several thousand dollars to reschedule their tickets. In this regard, the Comptroller General's Office revealed that as a result of the migration control, it was observed that the entity did not have enough stock of electronic passports to meet the demand of the 77,589 people who paid (until February 8, 2022) to obtain this document .

This situation is due to the fact that the supplier company has until next July to deliver the necessary inputs for the issuance of the passport without Migrations having taken immediate measures to avoid shortages and ensure the timely provision of the service.

According to the Official Guidance Report No. 072-2022-CG/SIE-SOO, Migrations had 63,230 electronic passport books (the only stock nationwide as of January 21), of the of which 31,000 units were in the security vaults of the central warehouse, while 32,230 units were distributed in the 23 care centers in the interior of the country.

The payment for the right to process and issue the electronic passport amounts to S/ 98 soles 60 cents. Between January and the first week of February 2022, the period that was analyzed by the control team, a total of 77,589 citizens paid the sum of S/ 7,650 thousand 296 million for the issuance of this document. However, Migraciones did not have enough stock to issue all the electronic passports that had been required by citizens to travel abroad at that date.

DRASTIC REDUCTION IN APPOINTMENTS

It was also identified that this year the number of appointments to obtain the electronic passport was drastically reduced. In November 2021, 42,064 appointments were attended for the issuance of the passport and in December 2021 there were 31,749 appointments; however, in January 2022, 6650 appointments were scheduled and appointments scheduled in previous months were attended, which allowed 43,260 passports to be delivered that month.

During the monitoring work, the Commission entered the Migration Online Appointment System and in all 23 care centres it warned that it was not possible to obtain an appointment for the issuance of the electronic passport.

This year, Migraciones suspended attention to the public, which was held uninterrupted from Monday to Friday, 24 hours a day and Saturdays until 19:00 hours, a schedule that it had maintained in force during the last semester of 2021.

NEW PASSPORTS

On November 12, 2021, a public tender was launched for “the supply of 700,000 electronic passport books and security sheets for the decentralized issuance of electronic passports service”, with the contract signed in January 2022 for S/ 14 million 336 thousand, less than S/ 6 million 223 thousand to the estimated value in that process. The French supplier company is the same company that has been providing this service since 2015.

Currently, the maximum deadlines for the delivery of the first, second and third total batches of supplies are May 13, June 12, and July 12, 2022, respectively; this, taking into account that the Act of Going to Production was signed on March 14, 2022. Depending on the basis of the process, a sample will be extracted from each batch and sent to a laboratory abroad for quality, durability, resistance, radio frequency, safety measures, among others; the contractor will have a period of 60 calendar days to communicate the results of the same.

The control report was communicated to the head of Migrations in order to inform the entity's Institutional Control Body (OCI) about the preventive or corrective measures it adopted to avoid the shortage of electronic passports. The document is published on the institutional portal www.gob.pe/comptroller as part of the policy of transparency and access to public information.

CONTROL COMMITTEE

The shortage of passports that directly and seriously affects citizens has worsened, the Office of the Comptroller General has accredited a supervisory commission to collect information and determine the causes of the shortage as well as, if necessary, identify the responsibilities to which there may be place; it shall also collect information to determine whether measures are in place to anticipate future demand and timely provision of passports for migration.

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