Big changes for ID and passports in South Africa coming

South Africa plans to create unique identities for its citizens and issue instant visas as it digitizes its economy.

The South African Revenue Service, the central bank and the Department of Home Affairs are working toward a unique digital identity, the tax authority’s boss Edward Kieswetter said at an event last week.

“The absence of a digital identity means that in South Africa I have an ID number, I have a tax number, I have” one for registering a company and another for being a hospital patient, Kieswetter said.

“I appear in the system in many different identities which allows for arbitrage — so I can be employed and get a social grant because the system doesn’t pick me up.”

The revenue authority is also working with Home Affairs to issue instant visas using existing technology that allows it to issue tax assessments in under five seconds, according to Kieswetter.

“The fact is the technology is there, so they are working with us to develop a proof of concept for instant visas,” he said

The Department of Home Affairs is “amending its five-year strategic plan and annual performance plan to embed digital transformation and inter-agency collaboration” into its work, its spokesperson Duwayne Esau said.

“It is still early days as this planning process remains a work in progress,” he said in a text message Tuesday.

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber in September said his department has a five-year strategic vision to go digital.

New ID system

SARS and other authorities have been looking to a new ID system for some time.

Speaking at the South African Institution of Taxation’s (SAIT’s) annual Tax Indaba i n September, Kieswetter said that the current system—with various platforms having their own identifiers—opens it up to multiple opportunities for corruption.

He said that having a single, unique digital identifier and an accompanying card would remove many of these risks.

Former finance minister Trevor Manuel—speaking at the same event—pointed to India’s Aadhaar card as an example of a successful digital system.

Aadhaar is a unique 12-digit identifier that digitally stores the residential, contact, and biometric details of an Indian citizen.

Identities can be authenticated with fingerprints or iris recognition at a machine at designated centres. Once authenticated, things like state subsidies can be transferred directly to a bank account linked with the same Aadhaar number, taking care of effective delivery and correct targeting of an individual.

However, Kieswetter suggested this kind of system could also extend beyond just payments.

Any transaction with the government—whether applying for tenders or having certification such as tax compliance—could be attached to the UID to ensure that the various government branches could know exactly who they were dealing with, leaving less room to hide.

Manuel said that this system was rolled out to India’s 1.4 billion citizens in short order—so getting something done for South Africa’s 60 million population should be even faster.

Kieswetter pointed to the payments platform developed in cooperation with the South African Reserve Bank (SARB)—PayShap—as an example of how far a similar platform could reach locally.

With Bloomberg

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