A GAO investigator recently used bogus documents to obtain four different passports from the State Department, even going to far as to purchase an airline ticket, pass through security and get a boarding pass at a major metropolitan airport, GAO has said in calling on the department to tighten up the program.
According to GAO-09-447, State officials agreed that the investigation exposed vulnerabilities in the passport process and cited limitations to its information sharing and data access with other federal and state agencies as one of the problems.
The officials also said they identified and revoked the fraudulent passports and were studying how they came to be issued.