Mr Goh Kian Huat and Mr Chua Guan Kiat came to the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) Building to collect their daughters' passports during the school holidays, when our Passports Unit generally sees a larger crowd.

In that week daily, there were around 700 more applicants than on an average weekday.

We empathise with them and regret that they had to wait longer than normal.

We would like to assure Mr Goh that, when necessary, staff from other work units are deployed to help out at the busier ones. At the same time, we need to balance our resources to attend to the waiting public, as well as to carry out backend processing of the applications received, so that the passports can be ready for collection as soon as possible.

ICA has been taking proactive steps to ease the crowd situation at ICA Building. For example, in December last year, we introduced e-XTEND, a new e-service that allows foreign visitors to apply for extensions of their short-term social-visit passes online. This has significantly reduced the crowd at our Visitor Services Centre.

We are currently looking into other measures to ease the crowd at the other services centres.

For security reasons, ICA Building would be secured from public access after the last applicant has been attended to. As Mr Goh and his daughter did not require the services at Level 3, the security officers asked them to leave so that the place could be locked.

There has been a spike in the number of calls received at the ICA Call Centre recently. This has resulted in a longer waiting time for callers. We apologise for the inconvenience caused to Mr Jason Lim Heng Yap when he tried to reach us, and will keep tabs on the situation.

Lim Jing Jing (Ms)
Deputy Head
Public & Internal Communications for Commissioner
Immigration & Checkpoints Authority