Many immigrants hoping to get Colorado driver’s licenses during the past three weeks were foiled when a Division of Motor Vehicles computer system was unable to check federal immigration records.
The glitch, started with a three-day national outage on Sept. 12 of the Systematic Alien Verification and Entitlement systems, said Tauna Lockhart, a spokeswoman for the Governor’s Office of Information Technology. The system, which verifies immigration status, allows connectivity with federal information held by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and is managed by a vendor for the federal government, Lockhart said.
“At the same time, the Governor’s Office of Information Technology upgraded its systems which interface with SAVE,” Lockhart said.
When the federal system came back on-line, the upgraded system wasn’t able to connect with it, Lockhart said.
It was Sept. 19 before state IT workers were able to create manual workarounds to get a proper connection. But SAVE continued to have intermittent outages, causing the DMV to periodically lose its ability to get the verification needed to grant licenses. By Thursday morning, everything was in proper working order, Lockhart said.
The DMV receives about 488 alien verifications from SAVE per day.
Verification of lawful temporary immigration status is needed in order to receive a licence, said Lynn Granger, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Revenue.
For those waiting to get a license, “It probably felt like three weeks, but there were many days” that the DMV was able to get the needed access, Lockhart said.
The DMV should be able to access SAVE, unless the federal system continues to experience problems.
“For now, OIT feels confident that the state’s interfaces with SAVE are working properly,” Lockhart said.
