Home Office agency issues commercial RFI notice outlining plans to establish a major new contract next year for tech services to validate and extract data from citizens’ hard copy documents

HM Passport Office is exploring its technological options for an upcoming £100m contract to support the validation and extraction of data from citizens’ documents.

The organisation – which is part of the Home Office – has published a prior information notice looking to engage with potential suppliers that could help it “gain an understanding of the technology available in the document management market”.

Ahead of undertaking a procurement exercise next year, HMPO is conducting a request for information (RFI) exercise through which  it hopes to find out more about “technology that is available to improve or optimise HMPOs ability to scan and validate identification documents, and then to categorise and extract data”.

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The agency “requires its customers who apply for a new passport, a replacement passport, or a passport renewal, to send in supporting documentation – hard copies – as part of their application”, according to the commercial notice.

“During the document management service [for these documents], there is a requirement to: validate the authenticity of documents contained within each application; scan documents to a standard that allows for easy reading of data on documents; categorise documents into streams as defined by HMPO; [and] extract certain data from images of documents. This RFI focuses specifically on the technology that is available to enable to above tasks.”

Potential providers of such technology that wish to take part in the RFI have until 28 June to respond. In order to do so, firms must first register with the Jaggaer procurement portal used by the Home Office, and sign a non-disclosure agreement.