The head of a German agency representing towns and cities said in Sunday’s Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) newspapers that the passport renewal process is sometimes taking four times longer than it should at present.
The disturbance comes at the start of the summer and school holiday season.
Official says his teams taking the blame despite not being at fault
“Rumors abound in the passport- and ID-issuing departments,” Helmut Dedy told the RND group of newspapers.
He said it could currently “take up to eight weeks until passports are delivered — normally it is only about two weeks.”
Dedy said that local authorities in towns and cities themselves were not to blame for this, rather the problem lay with delays at the federal document printing agency, the Bundesdruckerei.
“The delivery problem lies at the Bundesdruckerei, but it’s city employees dealing with the justified criticism from applicants,” Dedy said.
Some applicants pay a second time for express delivery
Dedy told the newspapers that many of the people affected — worried they would not receive a replacement passport in time for their holidays — would file a second and more expensive application for express delivery.
In effect, he said, these citizens were paying for the problems at the Bundesdruckerei.
“That is barely explicable and it is definitely not citizen-friendly,” he said.
In such cases he said people would have paid around €170 (roughly $185). He called on the Interior Ministry to ensure that anybody who had paid twice at least receive a refund for the first delayed application.
He also said responsibility for canceling the initial failed applications lay with the Bundesdruckerei.
School summer holidays have already begun in five German states, with the school calendar varying by state here.
Children in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, started their holidays this weekend.
msh/rm (AFP, epd)
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