And outside passport offices, a triage system was put in place, with agency officials scurrying along the lines dispensing advice and prioritizing people into "urgent," "nonurgent" and "awfully urgent indeed, old chap" categories.

Home Secretary Jack Straw announced the recruitment of additional staff—this for a system that was supposed to reduce administrative headcount, not increase it—and promised that the situation would return to normal by September, an assurance that came as little comfort to those who had July or August vacation plans. At its nadir, Straw personally promised to move "heaven and earth" to get a passport to a woman going abroad for her honeymoon after her angry member of Parliament raised her case in the House of Commons.

THE MINISTRY OF SILLY LINES
For both Siemens Business Services—the computer contractor that had developed the system—and the U.K. government's Home Office, the passport debacle bore an awful similarity to the shambles that had occurred a few months before. That was when Siemens' £77 million ($115 million) computerization of the Home Office's Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) ran into the buffers. This system was designed to handle applications for asylum, extended stays and citizenship. Instead of processing 3,000 applications a month in fall 1998, the period prior to implementation, the number of applications processed had dropped to 995 by January 1999. The legal status of thousands was unclear. Again, queues of applicants formed—stretching for hundreds of yards on some mornings—while telephone calls went unanswered and newspaper reports spoke of sacks of unopened mail piling up in the IND's corridors in the south London suburb of Croydon.

And while the problem's initial public perception revolved around hapless refugees from conflicts overseas, the economic reality was far worse. Foreign nationals working in key jobs all over the United Kingdom were affected—the country employs a lot of software engineers from the Indian subcontinent, for example—as were the top executives of incoming foreign companies intent on establishing a British subsidiary. Media coverage quickly refocused on lost jobs and lost opportunities for investment, forcing Home Secretary Straw to add several hundred employees to the IND's staff.

For a system that was supposed to process more applications, faster and with fewer people, the awful reality was that the new system was taking longer, requiring more people to administer and processing fewer applications. Not surprisingly, the government's National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committees, the two watchdogs that monitor government spending, duly lambasted both Siemens and the civil servants in charge of the project, with Siemens being fined £4.5 million ($6.8 million) for its role in the disaster. (In fairness to Siemens, the penalty levied on it in the aftermath of the Passport Agency implementation was much smaller and reflected the role of the government's own rule-changing in exacerbating the shambles—a fine of a mere £66,000 ($99,000) , despite the fact that the new system resulted in the rising cost of processing passports from £12 to £15.50 [$18 to $23.25].)