State Department Still Buried Under Passport Paperwork

Couldn't get through on the telephone. Couldn't get a response after sending an e-mail.

Those are common complaints from the many Americans who have applied for passports and are worried they are going to miss their trip abroad because the State Department did not gear up fast enough for the paper avalanche triggered by a 9/11 border security law.

"It is just so frustrating," said Rhonda McCrory of Versailles, Ind., who read about the passport snarl in this column on Monday. Her two daughters are scheduled to leave for Peru on July 7 on a church mission, and to make sure they have their passports, she is going to Chicago on Monday to stand in line at a regional passport office.

She applied for their passports April 2, thinking that would give the department enough time to process the applications.

Debbie Lindstrom of Walnut Creek, Calif., has gotten up at 3 a.m. Pacific time to call the national passport center when it opens. She applied in early April for a passport and got through to "a real person" this week. She said she'll be back on the phone this morning, making arrangements for a visit to the San Francisco passport office in hopes of getting the passport before her flight leaves for Paris on July 1.

Abby Cohen of Oakland, Calif., applied for a passport for her daughter March 19; it arrived yesterday. Her daughter is scheduled to depart in mid-July for a trip to Spain with her Spanish teacher, and while Cohen is happy to have the passport in hand, she thinks the "really incredible" wait was too long.

For about 11 weeks, McCrory said, she only got recordings when she called. Cohen never got a response to her e-mail asking about the status of her daughter's passport, she said.

Their experiences were not unique and underscore what can happen to a government agency when it is swamped by millions of requests for services from across the nation. Although the State Department has taken steps to improve passport services, it will be playing catch-up for the next few months. Officials do not think they will get back to the regular processing time of six weeks until the end of the year.

To tackle the passport application backlog, the State Department recently upgraded its telephone equipment at the National Passport Information Center. Last October, the center was able to take 414 calls from the public at any given moment; with the upgrade, it takes nearly twice that number.

The passport center has also increased the number of customer-service representatives, to 495 from 227 last September. Officials said that 187 more are in training or awaiting security clearances and that still more will be recruited.

The number of daily calls has varied greatly in the past month, ranging from 330,000 to 880,000, officials said. But calls fell off after the department's June 8 announcement that modified the passport rules for travel to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda. In the past week, about 2.5 million calls came in, half the number compared with a previous week this month.

Because of the volume, the department estimates that 46 to 80 percent of callers may be unable to speak with a customer-service representative. To improve service, the center has expanded telephone service, taking calls from 6 a.m. to midnight Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends.