National Identification Cards. What’s the Purpose?

                                                                                         

Small and large countries are weighing the pros and cons of national identification cards. Immigration, border control and economic reasons are just some of the items being debated. It is fairly simple to understand the perceived need to clearly identify an individual’s nationality for reasons such as employment and citizenship benefits. When reviewing things as important as who should receive medical services offered by the government versus who not to provide these services, the need for identifying a countries citizens is critical.

The only form of national identification is a printed piece of paper in many countries, and because of this many of these nations are reviewing their possibilities. These documents are simple to forge since they don’t contain a picture or other identifying marks other than being the person holding the document. Reducing the abuse of services and controlling costs is reason enough to implement a national photo ID card and database. Because of these needs and many others it is apparent that some of the information on the identification cards would include characteristics of the holder such as height, weight sex and eye color. Some nations have included items such as retinal scan information and finger prints into the national database and into the identification cards themselves.

Many of the countries that have started or are considering this process do not have an accurate account of its current citizenship nor any relevant or reliable census information. Starting a national identification process and implementing identification cards into a country in this situation has many other benefits such as border control, tracking citizenship benefits, criminal records and even military service. Currently some of these countries have systems to track these issues but in most situations these systems are independent of each other. Creating a national identification card and system would allow the creation of a database that would merge all of this information into a much simpler solution.

As governments review these types of requirements, it has become in many cases a task for outsourcing. For many nations, undertaking the monumental feat of photographing, capturing information and providing ID cards to every citizen is too large for governments to handle efficiently. There have been a few companies providing solutions for nations and one of them is FullIdentity.com. This organization has been providing photo identification cards for individuals for about seven years and have created solutions that incorporate much more than simply providing cards. In many cases solutions have been developed for countries that are not only easy to implement but also provide an economic benefit for the countries implementing them. Simply put, when outsourcing the identification card needs of a country to a provider such as FullIdentity.com, the costs are less expensive than they would be if a nation took on the burden of developing a solution internally. Because of the discounted expense, the country can charge the citizens less for the ID cards than they would if the nation was passing the expense along directly to the resident. This would still leave a financial margin that would be paid to the government.

It is hard to find an economic reason for a government not to implement a national identification card system. Advocates will shout that “big brother” is stripping them of their rights and privacy; but shouldn’t someone be watching our criminal records, military service and border crossings? Doesn’t a government have the responsibility to ensure that only their citizens are receiving benefits from their own country or should anyone be allowed to receive these benefits when their citizenship belongs to another nation?

About the author:
Founder of http://www.FullIdentity.com and Virtual Tournament Director, Allen Richardson has created applications for registering and distributing identification cards for over seven years. Allen is also the author of Personal Discipline, and serves as a consultant to many organizations such as Southwest Airlines and BNSF Railway.

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