HMPO experienced difficulties understanding how applications were moving through its systems due to weaknesses in its management information. Because HMPO’s digital system was not fully developed, it did not have the capability to process all types of applications, and could not manage the volume of applications HMPO was receiving. As a result, between January 2022 and September 2022, HMPO moved 134,000 applications from its digital system to its legacy, paper-based system.25 These applications should have been moved to the front of the queue for processing, but this did not happen. Instead, the application was treated as a new case and its ‘clock’ (the number of weeks it had taken to process someone’s passport application) would be reset to zero, meaning the length of time it had taken to process the application was recorded incorrectly. We heard that this led to cases where, for example, customers contacted HMPO weeks after they sent in their application and were informed that their application had only arrived the previous day.26