Longtime DMV vendor cries foul over new NC driver's license contract
A company that has long been under contract to print North Carolina driver’s licenses is protesting a state agency’s decision to give the job to a competitor, kick-starting what could be a drawn-out court fight.
Idemia Identity & Security says the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles violated its own rules and ran an unfair process that ultimately shifted the contract, starting next summer, to Canadian Bank Note Secure Technologies, a company that produces Canadian currency, according to a protest letter Idemia sent last month to the DMV and to state procurement and information technology officials.
Idemia wants the new contract rescinded and a new competition opened for it. If the DMV rejects that, the company can appeal that decision in court, a process that could take months, if not years.
Idemia says it could offer a more secure driver’s license at a lower price, that the DMV used an “anticompetitive” process to pick its competitor, and that the division held the companies to different standards.
The DMV also failed for months to tell Idemia it would lose the contract because the division mailed notice to the old company headquarters instead of the new one and emailed an invalid address due to a one-letter typo, the company’s protest says.
Division spokesman Marty Homan confirmed receipt of the protest but declined to comment on its details other than to say in a statement that the DMV is confident it followed “the proper procurement process and all applicable laws.”
Canadian Bank Note didn’t provide a comment when reached by WRAL News. A spokesperson for Thales, a third company that pursued the contract last year, said the state’s process “may be questionable.”
This contract was also the subject of a legislative oversight committee hearing last month. Republican lawmakers questioned DMV Commissioner Wayne Goodwin, asking why the new driver’s licenses will be printed with monochromatic photos when state law says they must be printed in color.
Goodwin told legislators that he hoped to change that law to embrace grayscale photos, which the U.S. government is moving to for passports. Goodwin also said Canadian Bank Note can print color images but would prefer to use grayscale.
Idemia says the contract at issue is likely worth tens of millions of dollars.
Much of the protest lays out the DMV’s contracting process, which didn’t rely on formal written bids. The DMV said during last month’s legislative hearing that it used a more streamlined process the General Assembly has approved for technology contracts in an effort to speed up contracting.
Idemia says the DMV informally solicited information from the three competing companies but “but did not prepare and share specifications or requirements to enable industry to propose a solution based on the department's actual needs.”
The companies were invited to separate day-long presentation meetings to make their pitches, but Idemia said in its protest that, to the best of its knowledge, “none of the presenters even knew they were competing.”
The DMV agenda for the presentations, provided by the division through the state open records act, is titled “Driver License Capture and Card Design Replacement Project.”
