WASHINGTON(UPI) -- Overhauling America's driver licensing systems to make them secure against identity thieves and undocumented migrants will slam state governments with direct costs of more than $11 billion over the next five years, according to a survey by state officials.
The overhaul, mandated by Congress in last year's Real ID Act, will also "have a major impact on services to the public and impose unrealistic burdens on states to comply" with a May 2008 deadline.
The National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures, joined by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, based their projections on data from 47 departments of motor vehicles around the country, which answered hundreds of questions about the costs of complying with the national standards on document security and applicant-identity verification the act mandates in time for the deadline.
Their report, published Thursday, paints a grim picture of a transformation it says states cannot complete on time except at huge expense and at the risk of overwhelming an infrastructure already running at full capacity.
It warns that delays in publishing rules for implementing the law mean projected costs could rise even higher, depending on the eventual shape of the regulations. It calls for Congress to push legislative deadlines back and provide more federal money for implementation; and for homeland security regulations to be written in a way that provides more flexibility for state governments to comply.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, where the regulations are being drafted, said they were working closely with state officials and listening to their concerns. Spokesman Jarrod Agen said the regulations would be published by the end of the year and that the department would issue its own cost estimates then.
"We recognize that (state motor vehicle agencies) could be overwhelmed," he told United Press International. "We're drafting the regulations so that doesn't happen."
The report says the biggest costs, nearly $8.5 billion, or 70 percent, are those associated with re-issuing all 245 million American drivers licenses so that they comply with the new standards.
Because the law requires that all documents used to establish identity be verified, and that license holders prove either their citizenship or their right to live in the country, the report says: "Efficiencies from alternative renewal processes such as Internet and mail will be lost" and states will have to pay out to hire more workers and stretch business hours to meet the huge demand.
The five-year deadline for re-enrollment that officials are currently considering, says the report, would increase the workload at state motor vehicle bureaus by more than 130 percent on average and more than double transaction times, resulting in "severe customer service disruptions."
It calls for the re-enrollment deadline to be made ten years, which will reduce the excess burden and spread the costs.
The report also says the law's mandate for electronic verification of identity documents needs to be relaxed, given that states anticipate processing more than a billion verifications over the next five years and that only one of the five systems required to meet the mandate is actually up and running.
The report says states should be able to go on using their existing verification system until the new systems are established.
For the full text of this article visit http://www.upi.com/