After several years of operating multiple credentialing programs for select transportation workers and disparate information technology infrastructures used to vet these people and others requiring a threat assessment, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has awarded two contracts recently to set it on a path of consolidating the front and backend systems for these various programs.
Earlier this month, the agency awarded Accenture [ACN] a potential five-year, $250 million contract for the Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing (TTAC) Infrastructure Modernization (TIM) program, which is meant to integrate disparate threat assessment infrastructures and also create the flexibility to support a growing demand for individual threat assessments (Defense Daily, April 5). The initial task order is for $60 million.
The TIM program will consolidate various stove-piped infrastructures for vetting truckers, aviation workers and other populations.
In a separate award in early March, this one worth up to $248 million over five years, MorphoTrust will provide the agency with a Universal Enrollment Service (UES) that will consolidate enrollment and registration for programs serviced by TSA. MorphoTrust is a business of France’s Safran Group.
The UES will first transition the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC), which currently has more than one million seaport workers around the country registered and issued a biometric-enabled smart cart, and then the Hazardous Materials Endorsement Threat Assessment Program (HTAP), which includes a fingerprint-based FBI criminal history records check as well as intelligence and lawful presence checks for all drivers seeking an HME on their commercial drivers license.
The TWIC program has about 140 enrollment centers throughout the country and HTAP about 130. Even though some port workers with TWIC cards also have an HME endorsement and some commercial truck drivers with an HME endorsement have TWIC cards, they each have to go through separate enrollments at different locations, pay a separate fee for each enrollment, and have separate background checks done on them.
“There’s been a duplication of the service. It’s inconvenient because you have multiple workers having to incur the cost of two separate programs or two identification pieces and so they decided to pull this thing together and produce one card,” Charlie Carroll, senior vice president with MorphoTrust, told Defense Daily in an interview last week.
MorphoTrust has been involved with both the TWIC and HTAP programs for years. The company, first as IBT, then later L-1 Identity Solutions which acquired IBT, and now as MorphoTrust, which acquired L-1 last year, has been the prime on the HTAP program since 2004. MorphoTrust, starting with L-1, has been a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin [LMT] since that program began rolling out five years ago. MorphoTrust is also a subcontractor to Accenture on TIM.
Carroll said that the UES program will take advantage of development in software modernization that enables a more user friendly experience and improves functionality during enrollment. He also said that the UES will go to a flat fingerprint method of capture, which is current standard for TWIC. The HTAP enrollment is a rolled fingerprint process, which is more difficult to do.
The UES fingerprint standards will make the fingerprints easier to obtain and process, Carroll said.
Carroll said that the $248 million for the UES work covers the TWIC and HTAP consolidations. However, there is the potential for other identity credential programs that TSA envisions to also come under UES, which would all be upside in financial terms, he said.
Indeed, there have been suggestions that eventually employees that work at airports eventually be required to have a TWIC card rather than go through a separate enrollment and vetting process as they do now.
In a press release last week, MorphoTrust said the UES program is expected to enroll over 600,000 applicants annually. Carroll said this just refers to the HTAP and TWIC numbers being consolidated.
TSA’s TTAC security threat assessment infrastructure was originally designed to provide vetting and credentialing support to 2.5 million individuals per year but that number now stands at 12.5 million. The agency expects this to grow to 20 million individuals within the next two years and between 40 and 50 million within the next five years. On top of various workers, the office is also responsible for pre-screening millions of airline passengers weekly before they board their flights.
MorphoTrust is currently working with TSA to establish a deployment schedule for the UES program that will begin with TWIC but Carroll believes that by the end of 2012 TWIC and HTAP will begin to come together.