Ministry of Immigration Making Progress in Clearing E-Passport Backlog

The Ministry of Immigration says it is much closer to eliminating the backlog of e-passport created over the past two years. Early this year, the Immigration Department ran into supply issues after they observed a 100 percent increase in passport applications. Immigration CEO, Dr. Gilroy Middleton, says the uptick in demand was unexpected and led to a backlog of passports. He explained yesterday that the new system is now and up and running and says the bottleneck is slowing being reduced. 

Dr.Gilroy Middleton, CEO, Ministry of Immigration: “We’ve gotten several positive posts not only from the new passport system but also from the customer service that our customers have been receiving in the simplest sense it is an economic issue the demand outweighed the supply and we requested additional supply back in December from the supplier Canadian Bank Note but however it takes time to bring all these materials together. Over the last month we’ve received over a year and a quarter supply of Epassports and we’ve been printing printing doing overtime working on getting everything up to date. As of last week we had cleared March, April so we’re looking at clearing May so we’re about one month behind and we’re looking at clearing it. The officers from Nationality and Passport Department have been doing an excellent job working overtime we’re trying to make sure that the’re not burnt out but we’re clearing the backlog and once we clear that backlog we don’t expect it to happen again. The suppliers have been informed, we’re looking at the statistics and in terms of getting a new supply we’re looking at making decisions based on data.”