Bulgaria's biometric passport scheme

signed an annex to the contract with Siemens which set the deadline for launching the system as March 29 2010.

Not just yet

Kostadinov writes that in January 2010, responding to an inquiry by Bulgarian-language weekly Kapital, the Interior Ministry revealed the true scale of the situation. The ministry said that the software for collecting the biometric data had not yet been produced by Siemens’s Italian branch, meaning that the system could not yet be tested. This could happen in the middle of March, when another of Siemens’s subcontractors, Germany’s Giesecke & Devrient, would deliver the blanks for the ID documents. In other words, the first testing of a system that was elaborate and completely new for Bulgaria would take place two weeks before it was scheduled to launch.

In the same reply to Kapital, the Interior Ministry said that the 278 employees who were supposed to operate the system had not been appointed yet. This was supposed to happen in February so that the ministry could save paying them salaries for January. The staff training was left for afterwards. The Ministry was adamant that no matter what, it would meet the March 29 deadline for starting the procedure.

The reality

The plan was that as of 29 March, only new-style ID documents containing biometric data were to be issued by local passport services at police departments, initially only using the regular procedure. The fast and express procedures were supposed to be available to people as of 6 April.

On 29 March, however, all these plans collapsed as police departments in major cities were flooded with hundreds of applications by people with expired ID cards or international passports, youngsters who had not had an ID before or people who simply wanted to renew their documents. The system collapsed under pressure, leaving queues of angry people.

“The program is stumbling because it is being implemented for the first time. The entire system is centralized. Which means if there is a problem in Sofia, then the system everywhere else shuts down,” Tanya Stankova, an official in charge of issuing documents, was quoted by Bulgarian National Television as saying. In other words, the media’s suspicions had been justified.

A few days later, the Interior Ministry blamed it all on the excessive pressure the system had suffered, as if this could not have been predicted. Siemens was also blamed for the problem, with Interior Minister Tsvetanov saying that additional support had been requested so that the problem be solved.

The ministry asked people not to rush to apply for new passports unless in case of emergency, so that the system could function normally.

On 19 April, speaking to bTV, Tsvetanov publicly apologized for the inconvenience. “There are no more people standing outside passport services waiting for their ID documents,” he said without giving a clear answer as to who would take responsibility for the “inconvenience”. He said only that Interior Ministry employees were not to blame.