The Express
1st August, 2006

Let’s introduce some common sense to ID

By David Ballantine

The Prime Minister was once heard to utter the words, “ education education education”. He would have been much nearer the truth, both in fact and intention, if he had said “regulation regulation regulation”. Perhaps indeed that is what he meant to say, since his government can certainly claim huge success, if in nothing else, at least in the manufacture and distribution of regulations, at vast cost and to little purpose other that to drive most ordinary people insane. There are too many regulations, and not the least infuriating are the Moneylaundering ones.

More and more time these days is being spent having to prove who you are. This is very annoying for the vast majority of us who know who we are and do not want to be or become anyone else. It is often just as annoying for the people on the other end who are having to comply with regulations forcing them to make you prove who you are, in many cases even when they know perfectly well who you are and have done so for a long time. People see this as ludicrous for it also has potentially serious consequences.

As a result of what has become known as identity theft we are all now encouraged to shred all documents bearing any personal details -even our address- before throwing them out, so that people going through our bins at dead of night cannot come up with enough of our personal life to become us. And yet what happens when I am asked to prove who I am? I have to produce my passport and one recent document addressed to me at my residential address which relates to services supplied to me at that address. What happens to these things? Are they handed back to me gratefully with a polite thank you?

No they are not. They are taken away and photocopied. Presumably then they are carefully filed in a secure place where no-one will ever see them again except the compliance officer. But the point is: who knows? They could be left lying around anywhere for any one to pick up. They could be stuffed in a corner and accidentally lifted by someone along with their Hello! and then left in a pub.

And I don’t have to go through this routine only once. This happens every time I want to open an account, invest in something, buy a house, get a loan, make a will, and any number of other things that people have to do all the time. There must be many copies of my ID documents floating around.

These copies render all of us extremely vulnerable and it is highly questionable whether they are strictly necessary. What could be more important than presenting your passport to an immigration official, which is what it’s for? Yet imagine the queues if he had to take it away, photocopy it and then write on the copy “I hereby certify that I have seen the original document of which this is a true copy” or words to that effect, and then sign it!

All that should be required is a simple statement that a person’s ID documents have been seen. A note of a passport and account number could perhaps be kept, but even that might be too much. Better still introduce an element of common sense into the system. The so-called Money-laundering Regulations, from which all this stems, were supposed to stop people using professional business services for criminal purposes. It is an offence to accept money if there is a reasonable suspicion that money is being laundered. There is a duty to report anyone who arouses suspicion and failure to do so is an offence. This should be enough – indeed many, including me, would say it is enough. Photocopying and keeping ID from everyone would be a joke if it were not so expensive in time wasted and so dangerous.

We should put a stop to this process which requires large numbers of copies of our most personal documents to be out there somewhere at the mercy of other people’s carelessness.