Queuing outside public institutions could be described as Bulgaria’s new national sport thanks to the saga of issuing new  biometric passports that began in early April.

For days, TV cameras showed angry people outside police departments waiting to be served in what had been promised would be a smooth and well organised procedure.

The situation was similar to what happened in 2008 with the new enrolment system for Sofia and Varna kindergartens when a new online enrolment system was introduced, but turned out to be unable to handle the numerous simultaneous connections and collapsed, forcing parents to spend a night queuing outside kindergartens.

It was the same when the Commercial Register was launched in January 2008, with some people having to queue up for three days before they were able to complete the re-registration of their company.

In each case, people had to spend time and money getting something done for them by the state funded by their taxes. Another common denominator in the three cases is that each was all about public institutions providing electronic services which, by definition, are meant to save people’s time and effort. Sadly, as the three examples show, the public administration let taxpayers down. This raised a lot of questions, about how prepared the administration is to implement new technologies, and about how good the administration is in exercising control over companies providing and implementing this technology. The issue of the biometric passports is a good example of all the shortcomings of the system. 
  
The deal
The introduction of ID documents with biometric data was a requirement for the country to join the European Union (EU) and was originally scheduled to come into effect before EU accession in January 2007, but was later rescheduled, with a final deadline in mid-2009.

The changes apply to all Bulgarian ID documents, including Bulgarian passports and Bulgarian drivers’ licences, as well as the "lichna karta" (ID card) for Bulgarians and residence permits for foreigners that will also include biometric data. For foreigners, the procedure for applying for residence permits remains unchanged.

As with most public tenders in Bulgaria, the selection of the winner did not pass without controversy. In this case, the winner was Germany’s Siemens which, in April 2009, signed a contract with the Interior Ministry to produce Bulgaria’s new identity documents. This happened despite three companies that had competed for the order contesting in the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) the selection of Siemens. The companies were Bundesdruckerei, Allami Nuomda Nur and Sagem. The price of the whole operation of issuing the new passports was set at 140 million euro, of which 116 million euro would go to Siemens, but as of January 2011. The complaint was the first obstacle that biometric passports had to overcome as the court suspended the procedure, which meant that Bulgaria risked being fined by the EC. As an EU border country, Bulgaria has specific obligations as a front-line border checkpoint to non-EU nationals entering the EU, and biometric passports are designed to help this process.

In June 2009, based on additional information provided by the Interior Ministry (information which was described as classified) the court rejected the complaint and the procedure for issuing the new passports was allowed to proceed.

Nothing is final
A few days after the court rejected the complaint, and just weeks before national elections, the then interior minister Mihail Mikov announced that the country would start issuing the documents "no later than January 2010".

At the time, Mikov said he expected the ministry would be ready by October 2009, but issuing would not start until January to allow any last-minute problems to be resolved. This was when the media started speculating that something about the way the system was being implemented was not right. As part of the process, hundreds of Interior Ministry employees had to be trained to work with the new system, which also meant that all devices had to be delivered and installed in time so that the system could be tested. 

After the elections that brought Boiko Borissov’s party GERB to power, there were further signs that things were not going according to plan, although the new Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov made biometric passports one of his priorities. In September, Deputy Interior Minister Vesselin Vuchkov told Parliament that Bulgaria would be ready to start issuing new ID documents not by January, but by March 2010.

But the passports of about 300 000 Bulgarians were expiring in 2010 and needed replacement. This meant that new passports had to be issued as soon as possible or these people risked being stuck without ID documents for some time. To address the issue and avoid embarrassment, the ruling party put through a change to the law that prolonged the validity of the old documents by six months. The ministry signed an annex to the contract with Siemens which set the deadline for launching the system as March 29 2010.

Not just yet
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 March 29, 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 April 6.

On March 29, 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 programme is stumbling because it is being implemented for the first time. The entire system is centralised. 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 April 19, speaking to bTV, Tsvetanov publicly apologised 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.