Accenture [ACN] last month said it has received a $71 million award under its US-VISIT contract with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to further enhance the biometric and biographic identity management system.
Under the 13-month award, Accenture will help expand the number of users for the US-VISIT biometric database system, called the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), and expand the services available to the various stakeholders of the system, Tom Greiner, Accenture’s lead on the US-VISIT program, told Defense Daily.
The typical uses of IDENT include Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Coast Guard, and Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The contract builds on ongoing work such as making IDENT faster, more robust and more secure, but also helps improve interoperability with the Defense Department’s automated biometric database as well, Greiner said.
Accenture won the US-VISIT contract in 2004. The IDENT system initially relied on the capture and matching of two digital fingerprints from foreign nationals, illegal aliens and other groups that populate the database. About two years ago, DHS began capturing 10 fingerprints from these groups but only began routine matching of these last summer.
DHS is considering adding additional biometric modalities to IDENT such as iris and facial images and is planning pilot projects in the new task order to examine these.
IDENT processes more than 300,000 encounters daily against a database of over 130 million records with an average response time less than 10 seconds.