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Rampant polygamy leads to fraudulent e-IDs: Minister

Home Minister Gamawan Fauzi has revealed that thousands of Indonesian men with multiple wives have compromised the country’s single identification system by trying to make more than one electronic identification card (e-ID), one for each wife

Bagus BT Saragih (The Jakarta Post)
Bogor, West Java
Tue, January 8, 2013

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Rampant polygamy leads to fraudulent e-IDs: Minister

H

ome Minister Gamawan Fauzi has revealed that thousands of Indonesian men with multiple wives have compromised the country’s single identification system by trying to make more than one electronic identification card (e-ID), one for each wife.

The ministry discovered the practice after officials recorded fingerprints and retina scans for the new ID system, Gamawan said.

Under the previous system where applicants were only required submit information on forms, polygamous men could easily get away with having more than one ID.

“When the recorded data from all over Indonesia was tabulated, we found that as of December 2012, 776,000 people attempted to apply for more than one e-ID,” the minister said on the sidelines of a Cabinet meeting at the Bogor Palace on Monday.

Polygamous men make up 0.5 percent of the total 174 million people who had recorded their fingerprints and retinas for the e-ID program.

Gamawan, however, said that the motivation for trying to make multiple e-IDs varied.

“But we later found out that a great proportion of the men were individuals who had multiple wives and wanted to have different IDs for each of the wives,” Gamawan said.

Each of the wives might have demanded that their husband have a single ID that contained unique spousal data, the minister added.

“Some of these men move from one sub-district to another within a city or regency, but many of them jumped across provinces to make different IDs,” Gamawan said, suggesting that many of the polygamous men had wives in
different cities.

Their attempts to make more than one e-ID, could have been foiled although some of them tried to trick officials by producing different names, signatures, and birthplaces.

“Some tried to change their appearance, by donning fake beards for instance,” Gamawan said.

Some of the applicants, however, simply wanted to test the new system.

Gamawan said that those people were curious about whether the e-ID system was capable of preventing fraudulent practices.

“But they were unable to do so because the online e-ID registration system prevented them from using the same fingerprints more than once,” Gamawan said.

Golkar Party lawmaker Nurul Arifin applauded the success of the e-ID system for tracking down polygamous men.

“I am an advocate of monogamy and these polygamous men should now know that they cannot burden the government by creating more than one ID just to please their wives,” she said.

Nurul said that the government should punish polygamous men who tried to trick the system.

“It is ironic that many of the men were actually asked by their wives to make different e-IDs. The women wanted to be seen as if they were the only wife their husband had, even though they actually knew that it was not true. It’s like living a lie,” Nurul said.

Data from the Home Ministry shows that by the end of last year, the government printed 110 million of the total 174 million e-IDs.

Of the number, 90 million had been distributed.

The ministry claimed that the Rp 5.8 trillion (US$601.04 million) project had exceeded its 2012 targets.

“By the middle of this year,all the e-IDs must be distributed to all eligible residents so that the electronic data can be used for the upcoming 2014 elections,” Gamawan said.

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