ONLINE FEEDBACK

Below are edited excerpts from comments posted online at www.jamaica-gleaner.com by readers to yesterday's lead story 'Stolen - Passport agency grapples with identity theft'.

A crime easily preventable

They can solve this very easily by using numbers that cannot be duplicated. If every driver's licence and passport has been given its own unique set of numbers and there is a proper system to track these numbers, it would be easy to detect forged passports and licences. Once there is a barcode scan, it will either match or won't. That's when you hold the bearer of such documents.

I believe, however, that sometimes workers are too complacent. They don't pay proper attention to what they are doing, and that's what leads to forged documents slipping through the system.

- Noshel

Use personalised IDentification numbers

The time has come for every Jamaican to be registered with a unique ID number that they use from birth to death.

I am not too surprised by the report, because if the Registrar General's Department cannot even maintain a registry of births, or even be bothered to put systems in place to make sure all births are registered, then what hope is there?

- Babes

An inside job?

It might it be that the passport issue is an inside job; that passports are being sold, just the same way that driver's licences are/used to be sold in Jamaica. I was offered a driver's licence for £25 in 1968, before I knew how to hold a steering wheel. Then I left the island and learned to drive and got one the first time I went for it, saving the £25 I would pay for a licence without knowing how to drive.

My particular agent, the middleman, did business at the time between May Pen and Mandeville. He would get £10 for every general PPV licence and £5 for private licences. He and his contact would split the difference.

Female drivers did not have to pay with money.

- Mass Rupert