How easy is it to get US passport with fake documents? Very easy, says the government

The USA Government Accountability Office (GAO) has discovered that it is alarmingly easy to get a US passport using forged documents.

GAO conducted four tests simulating this approach and was successful in obtaining a genuine U.S. passport in each case. In the most egregious case, an undercover GAO investigator obtained a passport using counterfeit documents and the Social Security Number (SSN) of a man who died in 1965. In another case, the investigator obtained a passport using counterfeit documents and the genuine SSN of a fictitious 5-year-old child GAO created for a previous investigation—even though the investigator’s counterfeit documents and application indicated he was 53 years old. All four passports were issued to the same GAO investigator, under four different names.

The tests were conducted between May 2008 and March 2009, so these security lapses are very recent. The length of time between application and passport issuance was 1-8 days only.

See the full report here.