A Sydney father was in trouble after the Australian Passport Office got his daughter’s name wrong, leading to a five-month delay in processing her passport.
“I’ve been a courier for 22 years and I’ve seen some very strange names, but I’ve never seen (this one),” Josh Davis told Yahoo News Australia.
The father of two said he had submitted passport renewal applications for his two children on April 19, well before a family holiday to Bali for a wedding in October.
“I saw a bit on Facebook about delays due to everyone traveling, so since I’m a worrier, I figured we’d finish up with the kids now to get this over with,” he explained.
The first mistake
By late August, Mr. Davis had received only one email regarding the processing of his son’s passport.
Confused, he called the Passport Office and was told that they had entered his email address incorrectly on his daughter’s application.
“It was those guys who entered it wrong because my wife did everything in writing and her handwriting is very neat,” he said.
Instead of TPG.com.au it was removed as TPR.com.au.
“I said, yeah, okay, you know, it was an honest mistake,” Davis said.
A wrong name
Mr. Davis’s son’s passport eventually arrived, but there was still no sign of his daughter’s.
“So I called the Passport Office again and the gentleman asked me my daughter’s name and when I said Sienna, he said, how do you spell Sienna?
“I said, Sienna, and he said, ‘well, that’s not what I have here.’
After being put on hold, Mr. Davis was told that his daughter’s passport would be delivered in a week and that he should wait until it arrived to check the spelling.
But on September 10, the Passport Office realized its mistake.
“My wife received a call that we thought was a bit strange and she was told that the name on the passport, Sienna, was misspelled,” said the father of two.
“It was written Siwnna, which has nothing to do with Siena.”
“But as I told my wife and my friends, there must surely be some kind of security check, you know, someone does it and then someone else reviews it, considering it’s a pretty important document.
“Unless they’re busy and desperate and just say, ‘Yeah, check it out, yeah, that’s good.'”
A costly mistake
To rectify the error, Mr Davis had to take a day off work, which meant working overtime, and queue for three hours to take Sienna’s paperwork to the Passport Office in mid-September, even though the Passport Office already had a copy of the teenager’s birth certificate.
A week later, Mr. Davis still had not heard from his daughter’s passport, so he called the office once again.
She was told that her email address was still incorrect, but that she could come and pick up her passport.
However, when he arrived at the office on Tuesday, he was nowhere to be found.
The document was eventually discovered in a pile of passports ready to be sent, with the correct name on it.
For Mr. Davis and his family, the process was “a shock.”
“It was all their fault, everything we did was right,” he said.
Multiple checkpoints
In a statement to Yahoo News Australia, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) said the Australian Passport Office has multiple checkpoints throughout the passport process.
This is to ensure that applicants’ names, photographs and other personal details are verified before and after printing.
“APO strives to ensure that every passport issued is error-free through rigorous quality and assurance checks as part of application processing,” a DFAT spokesperson said.
“In a very small percentage of cases, when an error is detected, the APO communicates directly with the customer and does everything possible to ensure that the problem is resolved quickly.”
The spokesman added that the APO is facing unprecedented demand for passports.
“This high demand for passport services is putting pressure on passport systems and has caused delays in passport processing,” they said.
“We regret these delays and are investing energy and resources to address them, including more than doubling the APO Number of staff, from approximately 730 employees to more than 1,900 now.”
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