Tales of the Red Tape #10: The State Department’s Passport Inquisition

Diane Katz / May 13, 2011

Rewarding failure is a fundamental precept of The Bureaucratic Code, which helps to explain why government’s regulatory powers grow in spite of its incompetence. Examples are legion, of course, including the recent case of the State Department and passport fraud.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) has on several occasions investigated the department’s procedures for processing passport applications and found them dangerously wanting. In 2009, for example, the GAO “easily” obtained passports using counterfeit documents. A 2010 investigation also yielded passports despite numerous discrepancies and suspicious indicators within each application (including, for example, photos of the same investigator on multiple applications; a 62-year-old applicant using a Social Security number issued in 2009; passport and driver’s license photos showing a 10-year age difference; and the use of a California mailing address, a West Virginia permanent address and driver’s license address, and a Washington, D.C., phone number in the same application).

So, pray tell, just how do State Department officials propose to remedy the problem? Predictably, they are proposing to expand the very investigatory powers they have failed to use properly and, in so doing, impose onerous new burdens on passport applicants—i.e., us. (more…)