Translated material
Passport stop
Muscovites again encountered problems when preparing documents to leave the country
Obtaining a new type of international passport with a so-called electronic storage medium in Moscow does not result in convenience, but in additional rushing around the offices of passport and visa services. The desire of the employees of the capital's department of the Federal Migration Service to quickly transfer citizens to new documents, as it turned out, is not sufficiently supported technically. Judging by the complaints received by the editors of Vremya Novostei, Muscovites are practically unable to independently fill out electronic forms for obtaining a foreign passport with an electronic medium. At the same time, officials refuse to accept old-style passport documents.The problem with the new forms, which can only be completed electronically, is due to the fact that the developers of the application forms used outdated software. “The printable form is a file with a PDF extension. To open the file, Adobe Reader version 6.0 is used, according to instructions for filling out electronic forms on the official website of the Federal Migration Service for Moscow. -- When you open a file, a form corresponding to a paper form opens. All form fields are filled out by typing text on the keyboard.” However, not everyone can open the files - a significant portion of citizens are already using later versions of the program to view and print PDF documents. Attempts to fill out an electronic form using other programs also ultimately result in failure - such a form is not read by the equipment in the passport offices.
“The data from the electronic forms is read by a scanner, and then transmits the information through communication channels to Goznak, where the plastic pages of the passport are printed and the chip is stitched,” Zalina Filimonova, press secretary of the Moscow Federal Migration Service, described to Vremya Novostey the ideal procedure for obtaining a biometric passport. And she immediately admitted that due to the incompatibility of programs on the personal computers of Muscovites and FMS departments, problems arise. “In such cases, we simply meet halfway and, so that people don’t have to go back and forth, we independently enter information into their questionnaires on the spot,” said Ms. Filimonova, noting that this approach does lead to an increase in queues.
However, sometimes passport office employees do not act entirely according to the scheme described by Ms. Filimonova, preferring not to press keys, but to redirect citizens to nearby points for the provision of intermediary services, which are located next to almost all passport offices. There, for an additional fee of several hundred rubles, they will help you fill out the form in the required version of Adobe Reader. Thus, the difference in price between the old (400 rubles state fee) and new (1000 rubles) passport becomes even more significant.
But, according to employees of the migration department, such misunderstandings are a normal process of testing new technical solutions, which is the biometric passport. “There are no such inconsistencies in the gross flow, and we report such problems to the developers of electronic questionnaires and the Ministry of Information and Communications of Russia. All shortcomings will be eliminated over time,” the capital’s Federal Migration Service assures, without specifying, however, the time frame for eliminating the shortcomings.
At the same time, the developers of the electronic questionnaire from the federal state unitary enterprise Scientific Research Institute “Voskhod” do not see any shortcomings in their brainchild. They complain about the information illiteracy of the townspeople and the use of illegal resources to obtain the sample electronic forms established by the migration service. “There are no problems with questionnaires taken from legal and official sources, we have not heard about them,” the Voskhod Research Institute told Vremya Novostey. “Problems are possible with forms downloaded from other sources.”
The Russian Federal Migration Service is already aware of the technical problems and reminds that old-style passports, which are not equipped with an electronic storage medium, have not yet been canceled. As Konstantin Poltoranin, head of the press service of the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation, explained in a conversation with a Vremya Novostey correspondent, despite the fact that biometrics is gradually being introduced in all regions, the complete replacement of old international passports with electronic documents is still “far away.” “The local authorities simply do not have the right to refuse to issue an old-style foreign passport,” Mr. Poltoranin emphasized, advising those who have encountered such arbitrariness to submit written complaints to higher authorities.
In 2007, only a little more than 200 thousand new-style international passports were issued throughout Russia , most of which were issued to residents of Kaliningrad, Moscow and St. Petersburg, who were the first to join the experiment. In particular, in Moscow last year, about 50 thousand biometric passports were issued, while over 600 thousand old-style documents were issued.