Machine readable passports closer

Four officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Immigration Department of the Guyana Police Force would be heading to Canada this weekend to finalise arrangements with Canadian Bank Note (CBN) for the printing of the country's Caricom machine readable passports.
Some 500,000 are expected to be printed initially under a US$3 million contract by CBN.
The four officials, to be led by Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs Angela Johnson, would include Deputy Chief Immigration Officer George Vyphuis, an information technology expert from the Guyana Police Force and an immigration officer.
According to Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee the machine readable passports would be in the country by July.
On the return of the officials, Rohee said, the Ministry of Home Affairs would embark on a massive public awareness campaign to alert the public on the phasing in of the new passports and the phasing out of the old ones and what would be expected of them in relation to acquiring the new passports.
Though he did not say what the price for a new passport would be when asked, Rohee said it was expected that the cost of procuring one would be much more than for the current passports in use. The new passports would also not be renewable.
Last December President Bharrat Jagdeo had told the media that the equipment for the machine readable passports was only a part of a larger project that would involve an integrated, secure system of record keeping.
The other parts of the contract would include records of births and deaths, Guyana Elections Commission data, as well as having licence and revenue and criminal records in one integrated system.
This system, Jagdeo had said, should help the government to better administer the country, to cut down on corruption and to track down criminal elements through an integrated module for fingerprint matching.
CBN has printed machine readable passports for Jamaica and Suriname.