Less than six weeks after the expiration of the current contract for the expedition of Passports in Colombia, the Comptroller General of the Republic issued an internal control alert in which it warns an imminent risk for the continuity of the service, since according to the control body, the new model designed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Printing does not offer sufficient guarantees to avoid a possible affectation of constitutional right to freedom of locomotion.
The pronouncement occurs after last July 18, two inter -administrative agreements were signed between the Rotary Fund of the Foreign Ministry and the National Print Passport production and distribution model with resources and direct state execution.
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For the Comptroller, these agreements do not mitigate the identified risks, since in the official statement, the entity led by the comptroller Carlos Hernán Rodríguez states that, despite having set as the deadline for the implementation of the new model on March 31, 2026, there is still no clarity about who will be the strategic allies of the National Printing to execute the critical work of customization, custody, distribution and distribution Storage of Passport Books and Visa Tags.
The alert also emphasizes that the current contract, in charge of a private operator, It expires on August 31 and that without new contracts signed by the National Printing as an executor, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as responsible for the issuance of travel documents, the country faces the real possibility of an interruption in an essential service for the mobility of citizens.
Colombian passports.
Private archive
“The risk of non -compliance is latent,” said Luis Enrique Abadía García, Comptroller Delegate for Public Management and Financial Institutions, in communication sent to the internal control offices of both the Foreign Ministry and the National Printing.
There he recalled that this situation could represent a violation of article 24 of the Constitution, which enshrines the right of all Colombians to enter and leave freely from the country, as well as article 25 of Decree 869 of 2016, qorE assigns to consulates the responsibility of issuing passports and travel documents.
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The Comptroller, which performs a concomitant and preventive control exercise on this process, urged the entities involved to take “extraordinary measures” autonomously to avoid the concretion of the risk and made it clear that “if urgent actions were not adopted, the provision of the public passport expedition service, with serious social implications” could be compromised.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Printing has been alerted On the situation identified as a result of the concomitant and preventive control exercise that the entity advances, in order to autonomously adopt the actions they consider appropriate so that the identified risk is mitigated, avoiding the affectation to the public service and thus prevent the serious social implications that could be derived from it, ”says the statement.
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This new attention call revives the controversy generated at the beginning of the year, when the bidding process to hire the new service operator was declared desert after several questions and legal resources, given that the Government then chose to deliver the operation to the National Printing, under the argument of guaranteeing sovereignty and control over a strategic document for the country.
However, in the opinion of the Fiscal Control Entity, this transition has not been planned with the rigor and urgency required by the legal calendar and if the course is not corrected in the coming weeks, Colombia could face to an unprecedented scenario with the impossibility of issuing passports from September.
Daniel Hernández Naranjo
Portfolio journalist
