Several months before being apprehended and released as part of an investigation into “genuine-fake passports,” it was the immigration authorities themselves who had informed the Minister of the Interior of the need to update the Passport Personalization System, implemented in 2003 and renewed in 2013, Le Nouvelliste learned from sources close to the matter.

“The Directorate of Immigration and Emigration (DIE) and the Directorate of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) present their compliments and submit for your attention a technical report on the current state of the Passport Personalization System. The implementation of this system took place in 2003 and was renewed in 2013; therefore, the system’s IT infrastructure, such as servers, computers, and other peripherals, as well as the base software, were installed during that renewal. Our server hosting centers (…) operate with a Windows Server 2012 operating system. Many of our workstations still run Windows 10. And on August 26, 2025, the license for the Symantec Endpoint Protection software was not renewed,” wrote Antoine Jean Simon Fénélon, Director of Immigration and Emigration, and Jean Oslin Lambert of the DTIC, to Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aimé on September 19, 2025. The facts outlined in the technical report “converge toward the need for IT renewal and an update of basic operating software to avoid any system malfunction, as we observe daily slowdowns in operations due to the obsolescence of equipment and software.”