During his meeting with a visiting delegation from Harvard University on Wednesday, President Ma Ying-jeou said that starting next July, passport applications will be required to be filed in person, which he hopes will accelerate Taiwan's participation in the U.S. visa-waiver program.

Under the existing law, local people can either have travel agencies apply for passports on their behalf or file applications on their own.

About 80% of people choose to have travel agencies apply on their behalf, which saves a lot of time and trouble of filling in information.

While travel agencies are willing to service customers and make extra fee, they admit there could be problems that the authorities cannot find out.

The United States is very concerned with the special phenomenon of passport application through travel agencies and states specifically that Taiwan needs to implement the in-person passport application policy to convince the U.S. and to grant visa waiver privileges to Taiwanese passport holders.

When receiving a delegation from Harvard University, President Ma stressed the mandatory in-person passport application will start in July.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs will start a 4-month trial period in March and if nothing goes wrong, the full implementation begins in July.

On how to solve the huge influx of people applying passports on their own, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has four venues and now plans to have household registration offices nationwide to first confirm the identity of individuals and issue an official document.

With which, passport applicants can have travel agencies apply on their behalf.

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