Malaysians still find their newly-issued passports incompatible with the e-gate immigration checkpoints at airports and at the Johor-Singapore border, five months after the technical glitches hit the immigration checkpoints nationwide.

Malaysiakini has received complaints from travellers, who said they were having trouble scanning their new passports at both KLIA2 in late September and at KLIA since last week.

"I had my passport issued by Immigration Department on Oct 1. I failed to have my passport scanned at the autogate when I arrived at KLIA from Jakarta last week," said a traveller, who did not want to be named.

"I looked around and found nine Malaysian travellers also queuing up at the immigration counters, I think they were having the same problems too," she said.

Another traveller also claimed that the new passport reader at the Johor Bahru-Singapore boder has of late not been working on new passports.

The Immigration Department, which first acknowledged the technical glitches in June, told Malaysiakini on Monday that the vendors were still fixing the problem.

"It is being adressed with vendors. Both Immigration Department and the vendors continue to monitor," Immigration Department director-general Mustafar Ali (photo) said.

"The vendors station their staff at the autogate to oversee if any glitches occur," Mustafar said in a text message.

However, he did not respond when asked how soon could the problem be resolved.

Not all newly-issued passports affected

Meanwhile, Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed denied that the technical glitches would affect all the passport holders with new passports that were issued in the last five months.

"I deny that it is a widespread problem and I leave it to the immigration director-general to resolve it," Nur Jazlan said.

A senior officer with the Home Ministry, who spoke to Malaysiakini on condition of anonymity, claimed that the new vendor had caused the problem.

"The passports supplied by the old vendor do not face any problem at the autogate; only the passports issued by new supplier cannot be read at the passport readers," the officer said.

"Not all new passports are affected. Only some of the new passport holders faced the problem. Maybe, (this is due to) quality issues," he said.

The Immigration Department began to issue new passports with polycarboante 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 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.

"The Finance Ministry gave Datasonic Technologies the green-light to start its supply in May, before its official contract began (in December)," said the officer.

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

Contract awarded in December 2015

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.

"There is no such thing as a large number of chips delivered to the main contractor had been rejected due to defects,” it said in a filing with Bursa Malaysia on Aug 3.

Datasonic said the passing rate of the chips after a 100 percent quality control by Trub AG Switzerland before shipment and a 100 percent incoming quality control by Datasonic and PKN is about 99.76 percent.

“Therefore, there is no issue on the quality of the chips," it had then said.

Malaysiakini has contacted Datasonic for comment following the new complaints.

The Malay Mail had quoted a source as saying the department did not have a sufficient stock of passports as a large number of chips used in the data pages were rejected by PKN or the Immigration Department as they were either damaged or failed to meet standards.

The matter of Malaysians queuing at Immigration Department as early as 3am soon hit the national headlines of newspapers five months ago.

Mustafar had then asked the public not to panic over the passport shortage, which was widely reported by media and caused Immigration Department offices nationwide to be flooded with crowds.

The department also ordered passport vendors to increase production and passport supply to overcome the shortage of stocks, which was causing congestion at the counters.

It also introduced online application for those who applying for new passports or renewing their existing ones.