A $28 MILLION Howard government plan to create a high-tech system to help stamp out identity crime has been plagued by technical difficulties and has failed to achieve its aims, according to the Australian National Audit Office.
The national document verification service, announced by the Coalition in 2006, is a computer network which is supposed to link federal and state government agencies that issue key identity documents such as birth certificates, passports and driver's licences.
It is meant to be used to check the veracity of documents presented by people as proof of identity when applying for services or benefits or government clearances at a wide range of agencies.
But a report by the audit office found that despite the Attorney-General's Department spending $17 million to establish the service and linking it to dozens of agencies, the system is not being used because of concerns over its accuracy and timeliness. The report said that since coming into operation in October 2007, the service had been used only 10 times a day on average to check documents presented at participating agencies. By contrast, the department had built the system to handle 250,000 requests a day.
The report said several major document-issuing agencies had not joined the service until well after it had started.
The Victorian births, deaths and marriages and driver's licence authorities had still not joined nor had the Western Australian driver's licence agency.
There were also technical glitches deterring agencies from using the system. Over its first two years in operation, the service had not identified a single fraudulent document and 38 per cent of its responses had been errors - including ''false negatives'' where the system reported that a document could not be verified even though the document was genuine.
''The delivery of timely and accurate responses … has been an ongoing issue for the national document verification service,'' the report says.
''Notwithstanding [testing of a prototype] and over two years of implementation, the project is still resolving practical implementation issues and is rarely used. It is unlikely in the immediate future that use of the national document verification service will significantly contribute to strengthening Australia's personal identification processes.''
The audit office recommended that the Attorney-General's Department should devise ways to fix the problems including ''considering the future of the national verification document service itself''.
The government established the service as part of a package of measures agreed to at a counter-terrorism summit between former prime minister John Howard and state premiers in 2005.
