Hearing Reveals Pace on Border Pass is Slow

[Kathryn41 3,205]

NATIONAL SECURITY

Hearing reveals pace on border pass is slow

Firm date eludes administration

By Douglas Turner - NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Updated: 05/03/07 8:01 AM

WASHINGTON — Fifteen months after the Bush administration announced it would create a PASS identification card, the government still hasn’t settled on its technology or timing.

Two administration officials admitted at a hearing Wednesday that the government does not know what the PASS card will contain or what kind of equipment will be used to read it.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the PASS card during a ceremony in January 2006 as the wallet-sized substitute for a passport that would be used to identify U.S. citizens entering and leaving Canada.

The new identification system is set to be implemented on the Canadian and Mexican borders sometime between next Jan. 1 and June 1, 2009.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, DN. Y., questioned the two officials during a hearing of the Judiciary subcommittee on homeland security.

“Have the PASS cards been field-tested in a real border environment?” Schumer asked Andrew Simkin, director for fraud prevention in the State Department.

Simkin said a test has not been conducted and the government does no know when the cards will be ready.

Schumer asked Paul Morris, an official with Customs and Border Protection, whether the machines that would read these cards for identity verification have been field-tested. Morris said they have not, adding that he does not know when the will be.

Schumer said to Morris, “You’re going to implement it as early as . . . seven months from now. What practical steps have been taken, what tests have been done to make sure that it can’t be — that identity thieves can’t prey on this?” Morris said he didn’t know.

“I would have to take that back [to my office] as a question for the record, sir.”

Prior to implementing an order to Americans to present a passport, or so-called PASS card at the border, the government must publish a regulation informing the public about it.

Morris and Simkin also conceded that the government has no ready plans to publish such a regulation, which must be in force at least three months before implementation. But the witnesses said they could not give senators an effective date.

Schumer, noting there currently is a 10-week wait to obtain passports, asked whether the government plans to open walk-in service centers by 2008 to help travelers get documents they need to get back and forth across the border.

Simkin said the government has no such plans.

“You would both agree that if there’s a six-week wait . . . before anyone could travel across the border, that would greatly hurt commerce along the whole northern border — dramatically — and hurt the economy significantly?” Schumer asked the two witnesses. “Do you agree with that? Yes or no?”

Simkin replied, “I’m really not an expert in commerce. It’s obvious that there is an inconvenience factor to this. . . .”

dturner@buffnews.com

[Saddle Bronc 124]

Let me see, Turner is referring to Feb 2006, when Bush had completed 5 years...

Does he really expect that any President in second term will not stall so as to push a load of laws to pass/reject to successor?