The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Thales DIS USA an $11.2 million contract, without competition, to support the Thales fingerprint and latent print matchers that run inside the department’s central biometric systems.
The contract, signed on September 30 for DHS’s Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), which the department moved under its chief information officer in 2025, is worth $11,218,048 for 12 months. It covers enterprise fingerprint matching licenses, hardware and software maintenance, modernization, disaster recovery, cybersecurity compliance and round-the-clock support for the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) and its planned replacement, Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART). Latent prints are partial fingerprints, such as those recovered from surfaces.
In its sole-source justification, DHS says the two systems are “tightly integrated” with Thales’s proprietary matching technology and that the government does not hold the source code, technical data or interfaces needed for anyone else to maintain them. According to the document, OBIM’s market research ran from February to August 2026 and included a February request for information that drew 14 responses, but only Thales could meet all requirements. Competing the work would require “a complete system replacement,” the justification says.
DHS said it would assess acquiring additional data rights, push for open standards and modular architecture, and explore splitting out components that could be competed later. The department has also been surveying the market for enterprise-wide biometric matching software.
The same DHS contracting office posted a separate request for information on October 8 for biometric examiners, multimodal examiners and identity services for OBIM’s Biometric Support Center and Biometric Accuracy Analysis Team. The notice says OBIM’s system holds the identities of more than 300 million people and uses fingerprints, latent prints, face and iris.
Examiners step in when the automated matchers cannot reach a definitive result. The draft statement of work says urgent fingerprint verifications average 12,000 to 13,000 a month and must be resolved within 10 minutes on average, with routine checks within 24 hours and a 99.8 percent accuracy rate. The center receives about 14,000 latent prints a month, and an optional task would add examiner review of face matches, which the document calls an emerging capability. Staff would work at support centers in San Diego, which runs around the clock, and Springfield, Virginia.
The draft contract would run for a 12-month base period with four option years. Capability statements of no more than 10 pages are due October 26 at 10 a.m. Eastern Time.
Sources: SAM.gov (justification), USAspending, SAM.gov (RFI)
–
By the ID Tech Editorial Team
