The backlog of North Carolina drivers licenses, which at one point reached 350,000 and forced state residents to wait up to eight weeks to receive their IDs, has now been cleared according to the North Carolina Department Motor Vehicles.
North Carolina DMV will be fully transitioned over from IDEMIA, its previous vendor, to Canadian-based CBN Secure Technologies by July, DMV spokesperson Marty Homan told Carolina Public Press .
IDEMIA is a security technology company headquartered in France that provides identity-related security services and products for several U.S. state and federal agencies. The number one provider of physical drivers licenses in the U.S., IDEMIA had been in contract with North Carolina since 1996.
The drivers license backlog began with a software glitch within DMV’s systems that allowed more than 2,000 North Carolina residents in February improperly to sign up online for licenses . As a result, IDEMIA stopped production of North Carolina licenses at its facility in Sacramento, California, for 10 days. DMV was typically able to issue 10,000 licenses per day out of the California facility.
How the 10-day stop in production turned into a weeks-long delay for North Carolina drivers waiting to receive their permanent licenses is unclear.
“(That) is a question we still have with the vendor, and they haven’t provided us with a satisfactory answer,” Homan said.
Heat from oversight committee
Representatives of both DMV and IDEMIA drew the ire of state legislators in the Oversight and Reform House Standing Committee during a tense hearing earlier this month.
During that hearing, legislators questioned DMV commissioner Wayne Goodwin and IDEMIA vice president of corporate relations Lisa Shoemaker on the root causes of the backlog and raised concern with IDEMIA’s decision to open another facility in Springfield, Illinois, in May to deal with the backlog. North Carolina law requires that all NCDMV credentials be issued from a “central location.”
“When Idemia opened another facility, they broke our state law,” Rep. George Cleveland , R-Onslow, told Goodwin. “And you, I understand, did nothing about this.”
“If they didn’t use this second facility, then you would not have solved the backlog at all,” Goodwin replied.
Lawmakers also questioned the legality of DMV’s process to choose a new vendor, which did not use competitive bidding. However, Goodman said that the price per card at CBN Secure Technologies would be cheaper than IDEMIA’s cards and insisted the DMV operated within the rules of the law to choose its new vendor.
Danville facility could end backlog
CBN Secure Technologies was chosen as the new vendor last fall, Homan said, and the plan was always to be fully transitioned over by the end of June.
DMV is in the process of switching out IDEMIA equipment with CBN Secure Technologies equipment in its offices, which will be complete by the end of next week.
CBN Secure Technologies, which currently serves as the vendor for drivers licenses in Virginia, operates a facility near the North Carolina border in Danville. Having North Carolina drivers licenses produced in Danville instead of Sacramento will cut mail time by about a week, Homan said.
However, the exact turnaround time for permanent IDs to be mailed to North Carolina drivers is yet to be determined.
“I think it’s a little early to throw a party,” Homan said. “We do fully expect it to be a quicker process, but we won’t know for sure until we’re fully implemented.”
Designing more secure IDs
Along with the new vendor comes a new look for drivers licenses.
The licenses produced by CBN Secure Technologies feature North Carolina-themed iconography like a dogwood flower and a marbled salamander, the official state salamander. The licenses are made of a strong polycarbonate material that will be tougher than the old IDs and there are several raised and indented elements on the cards.
These changes are more than just aesthetic decisions though — more than 50 security features are baked into the card that make it more secure, Homan said. The more complex a driver’s license is, the more difficult it is to produce a fake.
Changing the design of licenses every five to eight years in order to deter manufacturers of fake IDs is a good practice, according to Homan. The last time North Carolina changed its drivers license design was 2015.
Implementing mobile drivers licenses – ones that could be displayed on drivers’ phones – is still on DMV’s “wish list” for the near future, Homan said. Virginia partnered with CBN to launch its mobile drivers licenses last year.
DMV could take several avenues to implement mobile drivers licenses in North Carolina, including working through the vendor to create an app, creating its own app or partnering with Apple to allow licenses to be stored on drivers’ iPhones.
But first, the General Assembly would need to change the current statute to allow for mobile drivers licenses, which is unlikely to happen until at least next year.
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