TWIC Contractor Under Fire for Leaving Callers on Hold
By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the June 9 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
The call center run by the contractor responsible for overseeing the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program has delayed additional enrollments by leaving workers on hold for more than 20 minutes on average, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security said.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said when workers call the federal TWIC program help desk, “the phones are ringing, and nobody’s home to answer their questions.”
Though the contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., is required to answer the telephone calls in three minutes, Thompson said some workers are waiting hours.
“This failure exposes yet another flaw in an already troubled program,” Thompson said in a May 29 statement.
Lockheed Martin and the TWIC program already have been criticized by several ports for failing to enroll workers and issue TWIC cards promptly.
Leslie Holoweiko, a Lockheed Martin spokeswoman, said the contractor acknowledges that wait times have increased and the company is taking aggressive steps to resolve the issue.
“Our goal is to drive help desk wait times down and service levels up,” Holoweiko said. “That’s why we’ve implemented a voice-driven menu for self service, as well as Web-based card status checks, which have decreased wait times by 30%. We are now seeing a downward trend in wait times with a recent average wait time as low as 14 minutes.”
The TWIC deadline has been moved back twice by the Transportation Security Administration. Most recently, TSA said in May it was extending the mandatory port entry deadline for TWIC cards to April 15, 2009, from Sept. 15, 2008 (5-12, p. 5).
TWIC, which requires criminal background checks and legal resident verification for all applicants, is a biometric credential that will allow workers unescorted access to secure areas of vessels and maritime facilities.
So far, 322,000 of an estimated 1.2 million port workers are enrolled in the program, and 122,000 TWIC cards have been issued, according to TSA’s Web site.
Thompson said in a May 29 letter to Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, that transportation workers nationwide have called his office to complain about the call center, the primary means of communication between the TSA and port truckers, stevedores and other workers.
“I have been informed that workers are being asked to stay on hold for hours at a time to receive information that is often incorrect and misleading,” Thompson wrote.
He said the call center — or help desk — has “proven to be yet another poorly designed and managed program that is negatively impacting those individuals who comprise the valuable eyes and ears of our nation’s transportation system.”
A committee spokesman said that Thompson asked TSA to respond to several questions by June 2, but it failed to meet that deadline.
Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman, confirmed that TWIC callers are being placed on hold more than 20 minutes on average and that 70% of callers are hanging up after eight minutes.
“We take this lack of performance seriously and will work with our contractor to ensure that these wait-time contractual obligations are met,” Soule told Transport Topics. “TSA has taken very specific action to alleviate this situation, including having the contractor submit mandatory improvement reports with plans to decrease hold times to agreed-upon levels of three minutes.”
Soule said that a response to Thompson is “an agency priority and will be provided as soon as possible.”
Correspondence between TSA and Lockheed that Thompson made public reveals a growing frustration over the delays.
On March 20, Mary Hallam, a TSA contracting officer, wrote Lockheed to complain that the contractor was taking more than 16 minutes on average to answer the phone, more than 13 minutes above the threshold.
“In addition, over 70% of calls placed to the call center are abandoned after an average of eight minutes,” Hallam wrote.
Despite the warning from TSA, the average call wait-times actually increased when Hallam wrote again to the contractor on May 8.
By then, the call wait-time had reached an average of 20.62 minutes, Hallam said.
Criticism of the TWIC program has not been limited to the help desk. Truckers working at the California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have complained that TWIC enrollment centers located in downtown areas have not provided parking for their trucks, making it more difficult to enroll before and after work hours.
In response, Los Angeles port officials announced that they would allow Lockheed to use a trailer with a large parking lot centrally located between the two adjacent ports.
Los Angeles hoped to have the trailer ready by June 1, but a port spokesman said last week officials expect the trailer will be ready by the end of June.
“We will also be stepping up our campaign to let truckers and other port workers know that they need to act soon and apply for TWIC, due to the October 1, 2008, TWIC enrollment deadline our ports are still adhering to,” said spokesman Arley Baker.
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