The government does not plan to procure new autogates for immigration checkpoints in the country, said Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed.

He said problems involving some autogates failing to detect new Malaysian passports was being resolved.

"It is getting better. The Immigration Department is requiring the vendor to fulfill their contract," Nur Jazlan told reporters when met at the parliament lobby today.

The glitch first surfaced five months ago and Malaysiakini has been receiving complaints from travelers who faced complications at the with the autogates at both KLIA and KLIA2.

The Immigration Department began to issuing new passports with polycarbonate biodata pages and embedded chips, which were delivered by Datasonic Technologies Sdn Bhd from May 16 this year.

It was reported that Datasonic delivered 1.02 million units of polycarbonate data pages to Percetakan Keselamatan Nasional Sdn Bhd (PKN), the current passport supplier, between April and July 2016.

The government granted PKN a six-month extension to supply two million passports with chips from June to November.

Datasonic Technologies is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Datasonic Group Bhd, an eight-year-old company involved in ICT solutions, including smart card personalisation.

Datasonic Technologies was awarded a contract by the Home Ministry in December 2015 to supply passport chips for five years, or 12.5 million passport chips, from Dec 1, 2016, till November 2021 at a cost of RM318.75 million.

In April 2016, the company was awarded a new contract to supply passport documents for five years, or 13.4 million units, from December 2016 till November 2021, at a price of RM223.37 million.

Datasonic Group was reported to have claimed that only 0.24 percent out of 523,940 units of chips that delivered to and verified by the main contractor, before production as of June 2016, were rejected.

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