Thousands of Colombians are today affected by technical failures on the platform of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia, which processes appointment scheduling for obtaining passports, among other essential services. Behind this is a modernization of the Comprehensive Citizen Procedures System (Sitac) for which the Ministry authorized a payment of 3.109 billion pesos (about 860,000 dollars) to the contractor in charge, despite their continuous breaches in that work. This is the conclusion of the final supervision and oversight report of the project, which was not carried out and in which 15 months were lost.
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The most serious revelation of this document concerns that disbursement, made on December 17, 2024. William Albarracín, the Ministry official who signs the report as supervisor, states that the transfer authorized by his predecessor, engineer Luz Adriana Rodríguez, was made based on documents that did not meet minimum standards of quality, sufficiency, and suitability. Additionally, the invoice does not include VAT.
The origin of this debacle dates back to 2024, when the Government began to worry about the imminent technological obsolescence of Sitac. Instead of opening a public tender, the team of then Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo opted for a direct contract. They handpicked Aldesarrollo, a public entity that groups higher education institutions, whose broad social purpose ranges from space studies to nuclear energy installation.
The result of the inter-administrative agreement (between State entities) signed on October 15, 2024, for 10.364 billion pesos, could not have been worse: the first phase of updating and improving Sitac, which was to conclude on December 31, 2024, was extended twice, until August 31, 2025, without Aldesarrollo ultimately fulfilling its obligations.
From the beginning, the schedule showed delays and breaches. In his final report, Albarracín noted that it was unclear how the company claimed to be complying when progress on everything agreed upon was practically nonexistent. Nothing worked. Between January and March 2025, the module for scheduling passport and other procedure appointments failed in three pilot tests with several consulates. And in August, user trials revealed problems in registration and appointment assignment.
Aldesarrollo also failed to deliver a scalable and secure Cloud infrastructure. Today, there is talk of cyberattacks.
Even personnel management was chaotic. Seven months after signing the contract, Aldesarrollo changed its team, which caused rework and delays. Additionally, it did not submit the last social security payment.
No news of sanctions
In January of this year, the Ministry announced a sanctioning process against the company. Caracol Radio’s Investigative Unit asked Minister Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio and her press chief about the status of that process and the possibility of recovering the 3.109 billion pesos, but so far no response has been received.
Aldesarrollo is part of a group of three companies that the Secretary of Transparency of the Presidency of the Republic, Andrés Idárraga, requested to investigate more than a year ago amid indications that they conspired “to distort the market and alter the probabilities of the competitive system within the framework of public contracting processes.”
This Investigative Unit sought the company director, Omar Enrique Flórez, several times. On different occasions, his assistant, who identified herself as Lis Rois, said the executive was not in the office and would return the call as soon as possible. Up to the moment of publishing this story, that has not happened.
Asked about the reasons for signing such a sensitive contract with Aldesarrollo, as well as extending it and authorizing payment of 30% of the total, former Foreign Minister Murillo responded in writing that they took the best option on the market. “The payment corresponds to 30% progress of the contract execution, after verification by technical, administrative, and financial supervision (…). The execution of the remaining 70% is the responsibility of those who succeeded me,” he said.
The current presidential candidate provided a revealing detail: in the market study that the Ministry conducted before awarding the contract directly, Red Summa participated, another of the organizations reported to the Prosecutor’s Office by Idárraga.
Regarding former Minister Laura Sarabia, under whose administration the second extension was authorized, a close advisor recalls that this occurred just one week after her inauguration, when many of the officials appointed by Murillo were still in the Ministry and making decisions. The contract with Aldesarrollo was one of the 21 endorsed by her predecessor and that the current ambassador in London sent to the Comptroller’s Office for alleged irregularities.
Despite the alert issued by the presidential secretary, this year Aldesarrollo has amassed more than 347 billion pesos in contracts with different State entities. The Prosecutor’s Office formed a specialized team, supported by the Financial Information and Analysis Unit (UIAF), to address what promises to be a major corruption case. The Attorney General’s Office is investigating Aldesarrollo’s director for alleged irregularities in a process related to road improvements in Santander, valued at 1.7 billion pesos, coming from royalties. Nevertheless, the company seems immune to the questioning.
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