Case Study 9: From Transportation Worker Identification Credential, GAO-10-43, December 10, 2009

The Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, managed by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the U.S. Coast Guard, required maritime workers who accessed secure areas of transportation facilities to obtain a biometric identification card in order to gain access. A TWIC regulation set a national compliance deadline of April 15, 2009. In part to inform the development of a second TWIC regulation, TSA was conducting a pilot program to test the use of TWICs with biometric card readers. GAO was asked to evaluate (1) TSA’s and the Coast Guard’s progress and related challenges in implementing TWIC and (2) the management challenges, if any, that TSA, the Coast Guard, and DHS faced in executing the TWIC pilot test.

We reviewed TWIC enrollment and implementation documents and visited sites or interviewed officials at the seven pilot program sites. We found that TSA had made progress in incorporating management best practices to execute the TWIC pilot test, aimed at informing the Congress. But TSA faced two management challenges to ensure the successful execution of the test and the development of the second TWIC regulation. First, TSA faced problems in using the TWIC pilot schedule to both guide the pilot and accurately identify the pilot’s completion date. Although TSA had improved its scheduling practices in executing the pilot, weaknesses remained, such as not capturing all pilot activities in the schedule. This could adversely affect the schedule’s usefulness as both a management tool and a means of communication among pilot participants.

Second, shortfalls in planning for the TWIC pilot hindered TSA and the Coast Guard’s efforts to ensure that the pilot (1) represented deployment conditions and (2) would yield the information needed—such as the operational effects of deploying biometric card readers and their costs—to accurately inform the Congress and develop the second regulation. This was partly because TSA and the Coast Guard had not developed an evaluation plan that fully identified the scope of the pilot or specified how information from the pilot would be analyzed. The current evaluation plan described data collection methods but did not identify the evaluation criteria and methodology for analyzing the pilot data once they were collected. A well-developed, sound evaluation plan would have helped TSA and the Coast Guard determine how the data were to be analyzed to measure the pilot’s performance.