Not ordered to the table

The Moscow passport and visa service lacks one and a half thousand employees

The reorganization of passport offices and OVIRs, which was supposed to make it easier for an ordinary citizen to obtain a passport, led this citizen to hours-long queues that begin at the window for submitting documents. In many areas of Moscow, appointments with inspectors who accept documents for a foreign passport are made several days in advance, and the atmosphere in the premises of passport and visa services is tense to the limit. This crisis, which seems to have not stopped since the beginning of the year, when, due to the transition to new settlement accounts, the PVS departments essentially did not work for almost two weeks, the city police department could not be liquidated by the beginning of the holiday season.

The head of the passport and visa department of the capital's Main Internal Affairs Directorate, Aleksey Mikulenko, does not deny the existence of this problem. However, he assures that the authorities are trying to solve it. “Now, in order to relieve the queues, we are transferring personnel from one passport and visa department to another, but this is only a temporary panacea that saves one specific police department,” Mr. Mikulenko said yesterday in an interview with a Vremya Novostey correspondent. According to him, the problem of queues is caused today by the shortage of personnel involved in working with the population in passport and visa departments. Now the service lacks 1.5 thousand people. “According to statistics, it takes 8-9 minutes to receive and check one application form for a foreign passport, that is, the inspector can accept no more than seven applications per hour,” said Mr. Mikulenko, noting that the density of the flow of those wishing to apply documents for traveling abroad today are several times larger.

The head of the PVU of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate assured that a request to increase the number of PVU personnel has already been sent to the Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs. However, it is unknown when it will be considered. “And until we solve this problem, the queues at passport offices will not decrease,” he admitted.

Against the backdrop of huge queues at passport offices, the information that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has already begun to develop the design of new biometric documents for Russians only raises concerns, since a massive change of passports can simply paralyze the work of air defense, and at the same time close the border for many Muscovites. However, the capital city police department claims that the reform will not begin before 2007 anyway, and documents with fingerprints and other biometric information about the owner will have to be received gradually. “New passports will be issued either to replace the already expired ones, or as the pages wear out,” Alexey Mikulenko assured Vremya Novostei correspondent.

According to him, the campaign to switch to new generation documents is estimated at 23 billion rubles. This amount includes not only the production of the passports themselves, but also the purchase of equipment for the production of microchips, plastic insert cards, as well as the cost of equipment that will be placed at border checkpoints. By the end of 2005, representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs promise to introduce a law that will approve new passports. In 2006, as an experiment, the first biometric documents will appear among residents of Kaliningrad.

As Mr. Mikulenko explained, the new passports will represent the same familiar red book, but the number of pages will be increased, and as a “bonus” a plastic card with a microchip will be attached, where all the information about the owner will be entered. For now, it has been decided to put only digital photos and fingerprints on the microchip. However, a special government commission developing a sample of the new document is also discussing the possibility of including data on the iris and the thermal field of the face in it. “This data does not change throughout life, so it can also be useful for personal identification,” said the head of the PVU of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate.

Anna ShPAK