Blogs

I read a news story this weekend that really caught my attention in several ways.  The headline, “Puerto Rico Scraps Birth Records,” appeared in USA Today on June 14, 2010.  This hit home for me because my father was born in Puerto Rico and, although he passed away a long time ago, I had to think a little bit about whether or not I needed to make sure I got a new copy of his birth certificate for some future (unknown) reason.

Of course, this would not be all that easy to do since I remember my father having one birth date that he said was correct and another that was on his actual birth certificate.  I asked him about this when I was a teenager and got a story about him being born in the house in a very small town and the family not really getting around to informing the authorities in the county seat about that event for several months after.  So that inconsistency always made life interesting for my father and for “official” purposes he was born in September rather than April.  So I figure the record would be hard to obtain because I honestly can’t remember his “official” birth date because it’s incorrect.

But what really got me concerned was what precipitated this drastic action in the first place.  According to the article, “In an effort to end what it describes as a brisk black market in Puerto Rican birth certificates, which confer U.S. citizenship, the Puerto Rican government decided in December to invalidate all existing birth certificates. Those born on the island, including about 1.35 million who live on the mainland, must apply for a new birth certificate.”  The article then continues, “The black market is not fueled by counterfeiting but by multiple official copies of individual certificates.  In Puerto Rico, it is customary to hand over an official birth certificate to register for school or sports leagues.”  PR has since outlawed this practice but the problem still remains.

Too many “official” copies of birth certificates are floating all over the place, unsecured and getting into the wrong hands.  These are paper records that have been overly distributed and ultimately have gotten into the wrong hands.

Now take a tiny mental leap forward to your own organization’s digital records.  Which one is the “official” copy of the record and where does it reside?  If it’s not secured and if it doesn’t have an auditable and secure access system, it is just a button push away from being printed out and becoming an unofficial “official” record.  Scary thought.