State Department broadens Guatemala biometric system procurement

The U.S. Department of State has reopened its competition to build Guatemala’s national migration biometric system after substantially expanding the project’s technical scope from a biometric matching engine to an enterprise Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) with stronger resilience, interoperability and data portability requirements.

An amendment to solicitation 191NLE26R0085, signed August 10, extends the deadline to August 24 and replaces the earlier statement of work. The revised procurement calls for an enterprise biometric platform with disaster recovery infrastructure, stronger interoperability and protection against vendor lock-in.

The new requirements make technical considerations significantly more important than price, allowing the department to select a more expensive proposal if its technical advantages justify the additional cost.

It also changes how the State Department intends to select a contractor. The earlier solicitation said the award would go to the lowest priced technically acceptable offer.

The latest posting is not the first formal solicitation. The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), which manages U.S. counternarcotics and law enforcement assistance overseas, conducted market research in January through a sources-sought notice, opening bidding in May and eventually extended the deadline to June 18.

The new amendment reopens and materially rewrites the existing competition. The firm fixed-price contract remains reserved for companies in the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program. No estimated value has been published.

The earlier statement of work centered on matching software, a heavily specified server, installation, support and training. In a June questions and answers with bidders, the State Department described the requirement as a biometric matching engine rather than a complete ABIS.

Instead of a biometric matcher, the revised statement of work requires a full enterprise ABIS comparable to Neurotechnology’s MegaMatcher platform, or an equivalent solution.

The platform must perform verification, identification and duplicate searches using fingerprints, facial images and iris records. It must also rank possible matches, assess biometric quality, search watchlists and support bulk imports and exports.

The database capacities remain unchanged. The licenses must accommodate 160 million fingerprints, 16 million facial records and 32 million iris records, while handling as many as 3,000 passport enrollments and 270,000 migration records every 24 hours.

Those are capacity requirements, not projections that Guatemala will immediately enroll hundreds of millions of people.

The revised procurement eliminates most earlier component-level hardware specifications.

Bidders must design an architecture that satisfies the government’s capacity, response time and availability requirements. Under sizing problems during the three-year period specified in the statement of work must be corrected without additional government expense.

The architecture includes high-availability services, a secondary data center node, storage replication, disaster recovery failover and an appliance to protect biometric data in transit.

Details about the Guatemalan Migration Institute (IGM) – the country’s national migration authority which administers immigration procedures and controls the entry, stay and departure of Guatemalan and foreign travelers – internal network will be disclosed only afterwards under a nondisclosure agreement.

The contractor will not replace Guatemala’s existing migration applications. The ABIS must operate as a headless platform without a vendor-supplied graphical console. IGM will manage records through a locally developed C# application connected through supported APIs. Direct database access will not be permitted.

The new statement of work assigns ownership of biometric data, templates, metadata, indexes and audit records to IGM. The system cannot prevent the institute from accessing, backing up, exporting or migrating the information through standardized, nonproprietary formats.

That provision protects IGM against vendor lock-in. It does not establish the rules governing information exchanges with the U.S..

The document continues to say that the migration platform will be able to share passenger information instantly with U.S. authorities in certain cases.

It does not define those cases, identify which records may be transmitted, establish retention limits or explain whether U.S. agencies will be able to initiate searches through an interface or will only receive records, matches or responses supplied by Guatemalan authorities.

DEXIS Consulting Group, a State Department contractor involved in Guatemala’s border work, says the MIROS GT system it designed for the country’s migration authority connects with the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Biometric Identification System and Biometric Data Sharing Partnership.

DEXIS says MIROS GT is being rolled out at La Aurora International Airport and will expand to land crossings.

The government will give its strongest relevance assessment to experience involving more than 2.5 million biometric records and comparable work in Central or South America.

The amended documents are not completely consistent. Supplemental instructions permit a 50-page technical volume and request three contracts performed within five years. The replacement statement of work retains a 15-page limit and refers to contracts from the preceding three years, while its evaluation section uses a five-year recency period.

The documents also alternate between calling the acquisition a request for quotes and a request for proposals.

The changes show that INL is no longer treating the procurement primarily as the purchase of a matcher and a large server. It is seeking infrastructure able to store, search, replicate and export records at national scale.

What remains largely unwritten is the governance surrounding those identities. The procurement explains how the records will be processed and recovered after a failure, but not precisely when they may be shared with the U.S., how resulting information may be retained or what happens when the system gets a person wrong.

Article Topics

ABIS - Automated Biometric Identification System  |  biometric matching  |  biometrics  |  Guatemala  |  multimodal biometrics  |  tender  |  U.S. Government