More than 10,000 passports have been left uncollected by their respective owners at passport offices across the country.
With some printed as far back as 2013, the Passport head office in Accra alone has about 4,000 of them.
Director of Passports, Mr Emmanuel Enos who disclosed these during a media briefing on passport acquisition process in Accra, yesterday expressed worry that the passports have been abandoned.
“It is strange that people will go through the hustle to apply for the passports but do not come for them. Yet there is a misconception that it takes many months to acquire passports,” he said.
He said his outfit was compiling the list for publication so owners can come for them while investigation would be conducted to ascertain reasons for the failure of applicants to collect them.
For applicants who initiated the acquisition process but had not provided other information requested, Mr Enos said the passport processing system clears incomplete information after six month therefore applicants will have to re-start the process.
He said backlog of about 6,000 applications as of January 2017 had been cleared due to the purchases of new printers and said efforts were being made to make the processes faster.
On the recently introduced online application mode, he said up to about 300 applications were processed every day and passports ready in three days if all documents presented are verified.
He said there were plans to expand the services to the regions, indicating that office spaces had been made available by Regional Coordinating Councils ready for use.
On the operations of middle men popularly known as ‘goro boys”, he said his outfit was working in collaboration with other stakeholders to deal with them and advised the public against patronizing their services.
He also said plans were far advanced to open Passport Application Centres (PACs) in Cape coast, Wa, Bolgatanga, and Koforidua to reduce pressure on the other six regional capitals.
When it can take more than a year for someone to keep chasing a passport he paid 100ghc for thinking it was going to be 3weeks, you wonder what? Stop the corruption and inefficiencies at the place and see how many people will apply for passports and leave it there.
I can’t find my passport at Kumasi Office they said my transaction number is manual so I should go and collect it from the person who help me in applying but I did fill in myself.