TSA officials did not show up to a U.S. congressional hearing for transportation worker credentialing. The hearing was looking into why it has taken the agency so long to get a viable biometric credentialing and security check procedure in place for airline flight crews, according to a Journal of Commerce article.

John Mica, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the committee overseeing the hearing, stated that he will see to it that the officials’ testimonies is on the books one way or another.

The committee is looking into why, after six years, the airline crews still do not have a proper credentialing system in place.

Mica is not ruling out reaching out to the House Homeland Security Committee and Oversight and Government Reform Committee in an effort to force the TSA chief John Pistole and Transportation Worker Identification Credentialing (TWIC) program manager John Schwartz to testify.

In addition to failures with launching an airline crew biometric credentialing and security program, TSA also had failures during the TWIC program wherein despite the issuance of 1.6 million credentials, the agency failed to deploy devices for reading fingerprints by the deadline set out for them.

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