While we passengers are all but dropping our drawers to get on a airplane in the name of security, the passport office is issuing passports to bogus citizens with obvious ID problems. It was all part of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) sting.
The U.S. has an antiterrorist list that seems to work best at flagging old Senators and elementary school kids and seems to miss those who father reports them as possible terrorists. Now we find the passport office, keeper of the most sought-after document in the world, takes after the gang who couldn’t shoot straight.
Besides intra-govermental communications, the State Department passport workers have a real problem detecting fraud when is sits clearly in front of them. GAO agents crafted bogus passport applications using many identification items that should have been easy to uncover. Unfortunately, GAO managed to deceive the Department of State more than half the time.
State was easily duped by the GAO:
To perform this work, we designed three test scenarios–similar to those we used in our previous testing–that would simulate the actions of a malicious individual who had access to another person’s identity information, a practice commonly known as identity theft. We then applied for seven genuine U.S. passports and supported our applications with counterfeit or fraudulently obtained documents, such as birth certificates and drivers’ licenses, and the Social Security numbers (SSN) and identities of fictitious or deceased individuals. We fabricated these documents using publicly available software, hardware, and materials.
This damning report goes on noting that the passports applications were submitted using identical photographs.
Of the five passports issued, State failed to crosscheck the bogus citizenship and identity documents in the applications against the same databases that it later used to detect our other fraudulent applications. In addition, despite using facial recognition technology to identify the photos of our undercover investigators and to stop the subsequent delivery of two passports, State did not use the technology to detect fraud in the three applications for passports that we received, which all contained a passport photo of the same investigator.
This is not a new problem. Back in March of 2009 CNN ran almost this exact headline. Evidently, the passport office hasn’t learned much or improved much.
In the “most egregious” case, it says, the investigator used the Social Security number of a man who died in 1965 to obtain a Social Security card. In another case, he used the Social Security number of a 5-year-old child and obtained a passport, even though his counterfeit documents and application indicated he was 53 years old.
It is sad when the most sacrosanct of all ID documents can so easily be requested through normal Department of State procedures and issued. One would think that embarrassment of this order would initiate change at the passport offices. However, similar findings and a similar sting conducted only a year earlier didn’t seem to have any real effect.
I am dismayed when our own government continues to fail at the basics of identity fraud, immigration and travel policies.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
