NID office lacks funding

By PATRICIA KEAMO
THE Civil Identity and Registry (CIR) office wants to set up regional offices with printing machines to process national identity (NID) cards but the money question remains.
At the moment, the registry office in Waigani is processing and printing NID cards for the entire country.
Registrar general Noel Mobiha said plans for the project were in place but funding continued to be the issue.
According to Mobiha, 35,000 NID cards were printed in 2015 when the project started and this year, more than 180,000 were done.
“Back then, there were two brand new printing machines, but now we’re working with one old printing machine,” he said.
“That machine prints around 1,000-2,000 cards per day.”
Mobiha said the other printing machine was out of service and they were still looking for parts to have it fixed.
He said funding was the main issue and they were working with the money they had and waiting for budget to acquire one more office space.
Meanwhile, responding to calls from Vanimo locals to set up a printing machine at the NID office there, Mobiha said it was difficult as printing machines were expensive and a small printer cost about K300,000.
Former Vanimo local government council president Peter Yemin raised the concern of locals needing their NID cards to travel across the Indonesian border.