TRAINING OF civilians to replace police personnel who perform administrative duties at the Passport Office, is to begin soon, to enable a changeover by the year-end.
Ben Clare, Minister of State for National Security and Justice, says the programme will start with the training of the civilian staff for placement at the office and the retraining of members of the office to deal with the reorganised operations.
"The benefit of this (programme) is that police officers would now be available to do policing for which they were enlisted," Mr. Clare said, in making his contribution to the Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives on Wednesday. Also, he said staff was being recruited for the programme.
Plans to have civilians take over the administrative work associated with the issuing of passports, were announced by the Government in 1998. The proposed reorganisation was based largely on the recommendations of a study undertaken by the Management Services Branch of the Cabinet Office.
A spokesperson for the ministry said the police would begin training persons to become Immigration Officers. The training sessions will run for 8 to 10 weeks.
Persons who satisfy the requirements will earn from $289,843 to $344,520 per annum, plus uniform allowance of $22,230 and laundry allowance of $11,544.
Their duties will include processing incoming airline passengers, cruise and cargo ships and outgoing passengers.
Candidates for the job are required to have a first degree in Public Administration or Manage-ment, a diploma in Public Admin-istration or Management Studies as well as relevant experience.
Mr. Clare disclosed that by year-end, the machine-readable, tamper-proof, passport should be in place. He said a contractor has been selected to develop the passports and is scheduled to complete the job by December. The creation of the new passports is part of a process of developing a border control detection system, which the ministry will be implementing at the island's ports of entry.
"Unlike the current passports, the new passports will be compatible with the border control system...," Mr. Clare said. "Because of these features, it will be easier to detect if passports have been tampered with, verify more easily the identity of persons using our ports of entry and generally monitor persons coming in and going through our borders."
He added that the replacement of the current passports with the new ones would be done in phases, resulting in all the old passports being phased out from the system.
The new passport will be smaller than the current document. It will have several security features, including: incorporating the photographs of passport holders into a page, making it impossible to replace the picture without removing the page. Watermarks, specially marked pages, plus photographs and data that only become visible in special light are some of the other features.
